


Pink Fang

by avulle



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, basically canon descriptions of violence but canon is naruto so y'know, i hope you're down for it because that's all we've got, like wow, naruto except sakura is the main character, prepare yourself, sakura x punching, so much, that's the main ship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29408700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avulle/pseuds/avulle
Summary: One day, after a particularly unpleasant failure of a mission, Kakashi takes a detour through the civilian quarter of Konoha and stumbles on a little pink-haired civilian girl who performs a flawless transformation technique with the wrong set of hand seals.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Hatake Kakashi
Comments: 59
Kudos: 153





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative summary: Kakashi thinks Sakura could be super strong and decides to train her.
> 
> Alternative alternative summary: Sakura x punching, the fic.
> 
> The basic idea of “Kakashi thinks Sakura could be super strong and wants to train her” is inspired by [Rebirth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/259008), by [Oroburos69](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oroburos69/pseuds/Oroburos69). I wrote this not insubstantially because I wanted a whole epic-length version of that fic. Many story ideas are heavily, heavily inspired by [It’s Just That Any One of Us Is Half Without Another One Is You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/230916) by [Branch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Branch/pseuds/Branch%22) because it is great and I love it and it has forever colored how I read all Naruto fanfic. I'll point out the points I'm stealing from Branch as they come up. If you want to read something better than this, I strongly recommend either of those two fics, they are much better.
> 
> Beta'ed by [spiralingintocontrol](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiralingintocontrol/pseuds/spiralingintocontrol) and their spouse. They have saved me from many stupid mistakes and all remaining stupid mistakes are my own.

It starts by accident.

Kakashi Hatake comes home from a mission early, for a lot of reasons, none of which are good. He decides to go to a civilian grocer, just to remind himself why he does it—to see the civilian couple kissing behind a curtain that isn’t close to thick enough to hide their amorous attentions from the world—to see some teenage boys posturing in the street, projecting their voices just a little more than they need to, so the whole world knows how strong and smart and different they are—to see the children, playing in the mud with little shinobi dolls, yelling out nonsense jutsu names as they smack them into each other. (Fire Cloud Tornado no Jutsu! Sealing Ice Snake Dragon no Jutsu!)

Total chance. In another world, nothing goes wrong on the mission, and he never drops by the civilian quarter to smell the dye, or the cured leather, or the freshly baked bread. In another world, he dies on the mission, and all of his team comes home in his place. Replay it a hundred times, and ninety-nine times out of one hundred Kakashi never comes to this street.

Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, he never sees a little girl, with outrageously pink hair sweat-slicked to her slightly-larger-than-average forehead, doing a snake seal in a brightly colored civilian garden, and then shifting into (blue, pupil-less eyes, long blonde hair, meaning—) Ino Yamanaka before falling to her knees beside a basket of artfully woven flowers, chest heaving with exertion.

And if he hadn’t seen her—

Hadn’t seen her do that transformation jutsu, even though no transformation jutsu on earth ends in a snake seal—

Hadn’t seen her do a transformation jutsu into a near-perfect replica of an actual human being on what had to be her first or second try—

Everything would have been different.

But that’s not this world.

Kakashi stops, grocery bag held loosely in his hand, and he is staggered at the ability of a seven year old child to successfully execute a flawless transformation jutsu with the wrong seals.

He is walking towards her before he can think better of it, lifting his headband to bare Obito’s sharingan eye, and he sees the academy transformation technique before him.

In the swirl of the chakra of the technique, he reads the seals that were used to perform it.

Dog.

Boar.

Ram.

Except, of course, he saw her complete it with a snake seal.

What the fuck.

She looks up at him, then, and screws up her face in suspicion.

“Who are you?” she asks, in Ino’s voice.

“I’m your friendly neighborhood jounin,” he says.

She narrows her eyes further in suspicion.

In proof, Kakashi taps his forehead protector.

“Could be fake,” she immediately responds.

“It’s not fake.”

“Could  _ totally  _ be fake.”

He laughs, and flashes his hands through the actual seals for the transformation technique, and shrinks down to her eye level.

He opens his mouth and is interrupted with a finger to the face.

“Hah! I knew it!”

He blinks.

Double checks that he has, indeed, transformed into Ino as well.

“You got the seals wrong! You’re a faker!”

Kakashi blinks again, and then begins to laugh. It breaks his concentration, sending him shooting up to his full height, slamming his hand against the white picket fence before him, bent over double.

He is brought back to earth by a tiny, seven-year-old hand pulling at his forehead protector.

“You don’t deserve this,” the girl is saying in Ino’s voice, jerking his whole head as she tries to pull it off of his head. “You’re a faker, I’ll tell my teacher about you.”

He bats her hands away from his forehead protector, and stands up to his full height, still chuckling, and looks down at her tiny pupil-less glare.

(She still hasn’t dropped her technique.)

(Her chakra is tight-knit, clean.)

(Her chakra is nothing but a puddle, but she is holding the technique like it’s nothing.)

(Like he would hold it.)

She stomps her feet and screws up her face, and he tries and fails to hold in another bout of laughter.

She jumps up at him, hands flailing wildly, and misses his forehead protector, but succeeds in slapping him in the face.

He tolerates it, and gives her his best eye smirk.

“You can do the transformation jutsu, can’t you, twerp?”

She frowns thunderously at him, eyes blazing, and slowly works her way through the three seals of the transformation jutsu.

Dog.

Boar.

And, of course.

Snake.

This time, he is watching her with Obito’s sharingan, and watches, in disbelief despite himself, as her chakra forms a perfect ram seal as her hands make a messy snake.

He is still standing there, slack-jawed behind his mask, as she poofs into him, sharingan eye spinning (but not actually a sharingan, thank the Sage).

It is a remarkable copy of him, and as she reaches forward to wrestle his forehead protector from his head, he snags her copy of his mask with a finger, and drags it down to reveal a very distressingly accurate copy of the bottom of his face.

She doesn’t notice because he is a jounin.

(And also she has just, really horrible situational awareness.)

“Hah!” she crows in his voice, jumping up and down in excitement, his forehead protector clutched in her hand.

It’s a really a very uncomfortable experience, watching a child do a weird victory dance with your body.

Kakashi does not recommend it.

While she’s distracted, he unties her copy of his forehead protector from her head, swaps it with the one she’s swinging around in a blur of motion, and then ties his own forehead protector back around his head.

It takes him backing away from the fence for her to realize what he’s done.

She looks at the forehead protector in her hand, her mouth hanging open stupidly as she swats at the top of her head with the other hand, and then turns to face him, outraged.

He grins, and continues backing away.

“Hey!” she shouts, running towards the fence and then trying and failing to jump over it, falling straight on her face.

( _ His _ face.)

He barks out a laugh, and she makes a strangled, angry noise at the dirt.

He waits for her to get back up on her knees, with a yelled “That’s mine,” (which, hah, no) and a “Give that back!” before giving her a cheerful wave, and body-flickering away.

He is on the roof of a neighboring house and watches as her mother opens the door, and frowns at the ruckus the girl is making, yelling at empty air for him to get his gross, ugly, stinky butt back here.

“Sakura, what—” then her eyes fall on Sakura-Kakashi, and the faint smile on her lips dies a rapid and tragic death. “Who are you?” she says, her voice as low and dangerous as a civilian’s voice is capable of getting, glancing at the knocked over basket of flowers in his garden.

Sakura flinches in his skin.

“It’s me, Mom,” she says, hunching his shoulders like a scolded child, which, he supposes, she is.

“Sakura? Is that you?”

It takes Sakura a second to understand that she is still transformed, and then she nods, guiltily.

“Stop that at once.”

Sakura hesitates.

Like.

Like she didn’t bother to learn how to break the technique.

What the fuuuck.

“Um.”

“Sakura,” her mother repeats.

Sakura hunches down a little more and hesitantly goes through the three seals of the transformation technique.

Kakashi’s sharingan is still revealed, and he can confirm that watching someone make a snake with their fingers while their chakra makes a ram is still a truly bizarre experience. It doesn’t get any less weird the second time.

She shrinks back into her normal form, but she has notably not dropped the transformation technique.

She is simply using it to transform back into her own form.

He can still see the swirling chakra of the transformation technique around her with Obito’s sharingan.

“I was scared someone had taken you, Sakura, you really scared me.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

He laughs under his breath, and shakes his head as Sakura slinks towards her mother.

She is a civilian child.

Loud-mouthed and obnoxious.

Nothing more than a puddle of chakra.

She will never be able to use an A-rank jutsu, maybe one B-rank jutsu a fight.

Even liberal use of C rank jutsus would leave her incapacitated at her enemy’s feet in any fight of real length.

She will have to fight her entire career on D-rank jutsus.

Nothing going in her favor but enough chakra control to mentally form a seal while physically making another.

Bizarre, yes.

But useful?

Well.

Who knows?

But Kakashi would very much like to find out.

As Kakashi arrives at his apartment, and, as he realizes he forgot his groceries in the middle of the street in front of the girl (Sakura, apparently)’s house, he recalls his father.

Hero of the third shinobi war, held in the same esteem as the sannin.

Civilian born, with nothing but a puddle of chakra.

Maybe the techniques won’t take with Sakura, but.

It’s a place to start.

His father had always wanted a proper apprentice.

(He had wanted Kakashi to be that apprentice—)

(But Kakashi was born with a brain for memorizing techniques, an ocean of chakra and no patience for honing the academy three into what his father made of them.)

Really, it’s the least Kakashi can do.

The next day finds Kakashi leaning against the wall of the outer fence of the academy grounds, porn out, but attention on the grounds before him.

Sakura doesn’t notice him, but some of the other children do.

Shinobi children, mostly.

The Nara boy, in particular, keeps glancing at him out of the corner of his eye.

Naruto doesn’t.

Kakashi takes a deep, shuddering breath, tries to put Naruto out of his mind.

Focuses on the little pink kunoichi-to-be.

She is really—

Quite horrible.

Her stance is perfect.

Her hold on the kunai is perfect.

Her aim is just—

Atrocious.

Before the turn got around to her, she had been proudly spouting the exact right way to do it, how you have to hold your kunai like this and have your stance like this, and she had been 100 percent right.

However, as all ninja eventually learn—

Knowing and doing are different things.

Now she’s staring at her feet, color high in her cheeks, being comforted by Ino. 

Looking at Ino again, now, Kakashi is struck by how accurate Sakura’s rendition of her was.

He’d think she got it so right because of how close they seem to be, but she had his face correct down to the mole on his chin, so.

Nope.

It’s as she’s wiping at her eyes and leaning her face into Ino that she sees him.

Her eyes widen, and her face gets red all the way up to her pink hairline as she sputters at the sight of him.

She points, chattering at Ino.

“I told you!” Kakashi hears her yell. “Look, it’s the faker I was telling you about!”

Ino’s gaze drifts to him.

She’d been one of the shinobi children that had noticed him.

She’d been one of the shinobi children who had  _ recognized _ him.

“I’m going to go—”

“Sakura, wait—”

Sakura doesn’t wait, racing over to him to shove her finger in his face.

Her arms are just long enough to almost jam it into his nose.

He quirks his visible eyebrow.

“Are you hiding your weird gross eye so that I won’t recognize you? I’m not stupid, I know it’s you.”

His…

Weird gross eye?

That’s not a way he’s ever had Obito’s sharingan referred to before.

“Sakura, Sakura,” Ino is calling out, running behind her.

(The fact she wasn’t able to outrun Sakura’s clumsy steps isn’t a great sign for her future as a ninja, but the Yamanakas have never really been known for their physical prowess.)

(Also, y’know. She’s seven.)

She grabs Sakura back from Kakashi, bowing to him with a strained smile as she spins Sakura away from him and Sakura squawks “Ino, what—”

“That’s Kakashi Hatake,” Ino says in a hushed whisper he can hear just—

Every word of.

“Uhh,” Sakura says, glancing back at him and sticking her tongue out at him because she is seven years old. 

He resists returning the favor, not because he is a twenty one year old man, but because he is wearing a mask, and he does not want to have to smell spit on his mask for the rest of the day.

Ino jerks Sakura back around, presses their cheeks together so Sakura can’t make faces at Kakashi anymore.

“He’s a jounin!”

“Noo,” Sakura says. “He can’t even do the transformation technique right, that’s impossible.”

There is a moment of silence in which Ino frowns, and then separates from Sakura enough to glance back at him.

In her eyes, he can see her wondering.

Did Kakashi actually screw up one of the academy three?

He’s hurt.

Really.

Deeply, truly.

Ino smushes her cheek back against Sakura’s again.

“I’m pretty sure if he did, he was just messing with you. Kakashi’s the worst.”

Kakashi holds back a snort.

Wow.

Seven-year-olds.

Ino pauses.

She glances back at him.

He quirks his eyebrow up pointedly.

“I mean, you’re great. Dad has no bad things to say about you.”

This time, he actually laughs.

He fondly remembers Inoichi’s face when he showed up two hours late for his last debrief.

Good times.

“I have bad things to say about you,” Sakura offers. They have turned back to him. “I think you’re stupid, and gross.”

Ino’s face as Sakura proudly declares her contempt for him is priceless.

He is a bit sad he doesn’t have Obito’s sharingan out to remember this moment forever.

Behind the two children, Iruka jogs up, leaving Mizuki to watch the rest of the children, his face twisted with the fear of a chuunin instructor who has realized his children are being obnoxious at a jounin.

(It’s a very specific and frequently realized fear.)

“Sakura, Ino—” he scolds, color high in his cheeks as he plants a hand on both Sakura’s and Ino’s shoulders and pulls them back from him a bit. Apparently he heard Sakura’s proud declaration of contempt, and Kakashi has to hold back a chuckle. “Kakashi-senpai, I’m so sorry,” he says, a forced smile on his lips. “I was distracted by the other kids but that—”

“Iruka, don’t worry about it.” Iruka doesn’t relax. “It’s okay if you teach your students that I’m stupid and gross. I’m not judging.”

Iruka’s breath rushes out of him in a comically loud whoosh.

“Senpai,” he scolds, as Kakashi loses his battle with his own mirth.

He doubles down, and Sakura takes the opportunity to make an attempt on his forehead protector.

“Sakura!” Ino and Iruka shout, scandalized.

They’re so scandalized, in fact, that Kakashi lets her take it.

“Look, look!” Sakura proudly declares, waving it above her head. “He doesn’t deserve it. He’s a bad ninja.”

Thankfully, this time Kakashi has Obito’s sharingan out, so he can forever immortalize the horror on Ino and Iruka’s faces as Sakura waves his forehead protector over her head.

“Sakura,” Iruka says with gritted teeth. “Give Kakashi-senpai back his forehead protector.”

Ino is desperately pulling at Sakura’s arm, but Sakura is refusing to budge.

“But he can’t even do the transformation technique correctly! I bet he hasn’t even graduated from the academy!”

“Sakura,” Iruka repeats, enunciating each syllable of her name separately.

Sakura stops waving his forehead protector, and slumps a little.

“He did it wrong, though, I swear.”

Iruka sighs.

“How would you know? We haven’t started covering the academy three yet. That’s third year material.”

Kakashi blinks.

It—

It is.

Sakura is a second year student.

He’s getting dull—if he was this unobservant in the field, it would have gotten him killed.

He turns to look down at Sakura, and she’s slumped, his forehead protector hanging loosely in one hand.

“Um,” she says. “I read it in the textbook?”

“It’s not in the textbook,” Iruka says softly, hand on her shoulder.

“The library?” she says, voice smaller.

“Sakura.”

Kakashi raises his gaze from Sakura, and sees Mizuki looking in their direction. Mizuki, the career chuunin, who has never learned to hide fear in his gaze.

_ Dull, dull _ , he curses himself.

Sakura had been so sure of her incorrect seals. Like she’d read it somewhere. And he’d just seen her rattle off kunai technique word for word from her textbook.

So.

Question:

Where had she learned those incorrect seals?

“Mizuki gave them to me. Don’t be mad,” she continues. “He said that as a civilian child, I needed some help to keep up with my classmates, and he would help by—by giving me scrolls for the academy three. He said I’d have to practice a lot, even though they’d be hard at first. He told me to keep it a secret, so that the other students wouldn’t get—” she hiccupped “—jealous.”

Iruka frowns. He glances back at Mizuki, where Mizuki’s still standing among the increasingly unruly children, and Mizuki masks his fear with a confused smile.

“Sakura, Mizuki wouldn’t do that. The academy three can be very dangerous to be used unsupervised. Sakura, I realize—”

Iruka’s eyes catch Kakashi’s spinning sharingan, and he falls silent as Kakashi’s genjutsu speaks to him.

_ She’s telling the truth _ .

Iruka’s face blanches in surprise.

_ Apologize. _

Iruka looks back down at where Sakura is shaking in silent tears.

“I—I—” she chokes out.

Iruka’s eyes widen, and he gets down on his knees in front of her, and takes her hands in his, pulling them away from her blotchy face.

“I’m sorry. You were right, I believe you.” He glances up at Kakashi—

_ Ask her where the scrolls are, and bring them to me _ , Kakashi instructs.

“Where are the scrolls he gave you?”

Kakashi lets his gaze wander to the other seven year old as Sakura tells Iruka where her scrolls are, and he finds her glaring bloody murder at Mizuki, her lips curled away from her teeth in tiny infant rage.

Well.

Ino understands what happened, then. The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree.

She’s gonna need to work on letting it show on her face, though.

He plants his hand on her hair, and ruffles it. She shakes his hand away from her hair, hands rising to her hair to try and push it back into some semblance of order. When their gazes meet, he smiles under his mask, a manic, bloodthirsty smile.

He knows from practical experience you can recognize it from his eyes.

Some of the manic bloodthirst twisted up in Ino’s expression fades.

He pats her head again, which she swats away, and turns his attention back to Iruka.

_ Don’t open them _ , Kakashi instructs a moment before Iruka body-flickers away.

Iruka’s eyes widen, and then he vanishes in a puff of leaves.

Beneath him, Ino rushes to Sakura, and gathers her up in a tight hug.

“You believe me, right, Ino? I’m sorry for not telling you, it was just—he said. He said—”

“Yeah, totally,” Ino says, meeting Kakashi’s eyes above Sakura’s head. He nods to her, and gives her his best comforting eye smile.

A moment later, and Iruka has returned in a second puff of leaves, three scrolls in his hands. Standing among the children who have at this point basically entirely given up on their kunai practice to stare towards Kakashi’s group, Mizuki’s face pales. Their eyes meet, and Kakashi gives Mizuki his best eye smile.

_ Leave and die _ , a genjutsu copy of him whispers in Mizuki’s ear.

Mizuki jerks, and Kakashi gives him one last eye smile before turning back to Iruka.

He examines the scrolls in Iruka’s hands through Obito’s sharingan, and finds a jutsu wound through the paper of each scroll. It’s an information protection jutsu, designed to modify the contents of the scroll if anyone but a select individual sees it.

It is a common sight on jutsu scrolls.

It has no business on scrolls for the academy three.

_ Ask her which is which _ , Kakashi instructs Iruka.

Iruka frowns briefly down at the three identical scrolls before doing as requested.

“Um,” Sakura says, disentangling herself from Ino, and leaning over them. After a moment she nods, and taps the scrolls in order, from top to bottom, “clone, replacement, transformation.” When Iruka stares blankly at her, she looks away. “I could only get transformation to work. I was going to ask Mizuki about the other two, because no matter what I did, I couldn’t get them to work.”

Yes, this was likely because they all had incorrect seals.

(He decides to temporarily set aside the fact Sakura had been able to tell the three scrolls apart, even though he had only been able to distinguish them by the subtle color gradations in the jutsus tied around them.)

_ Have her open the transformation scroll, then close your eyes before she does _ .

Iruka frowns, but then obeys.

“Okay?” She takes the scroll from the pile, and glances nervously around her.

She opens the scroll, and Kakashi immediately closes his eyes, and covers Ino’s.

“ _Hey!_ ” Ino squawks.

“Yeah, see! This has—”

Kakashi opens his eyes, and focuses Obito’s sharingan on the fully unrolled scroll.

In the moment his eyes fall upon the words they begin to change. Some subtly (those describing the shape and texture of the chakra, the dismissive tone of the work), some more boldly (the seal sequence, the lack of instructions on how to break the technique, the introductory paragraph that proclaims it the most trivial of techniques that only the most incompetent students couldn’t master on the order of hours). 

Thankfully, Kakashi has Obito’s sharingan and therefore perfect recall.

He was able to see, very clearly, the sequence as it was originally printed:

Dog.

Boar.

Snake.

He removes his hand from Ino’s eyes, and she slaps at his hand as it leaves.

Which, you know.

Fair.

“Wait,” Sakura says. “Wait, it changed, I swear, tell me you saw it.”

_ Tell her you saw it _ , Kakashi instructs.

“Of course I saw it,” Iruka responds.

_ Dog, boar, snake. _

Iruka’s eyes widen.

“Dog, boar, snake,” he repeats.

Sakura relaxes. She glanced at Ino.

“You saw it too, right, Ino?”

Ino, without a trace of hesitation, nods.

“Yeah, of course, Sakura! Definitely.”

Sakura settles some more.

Then her brow furrows.

“Is this. Is this the right technique? This. This was the faker’s seals.” She looks down at the forehead protector now pinched under her armpit, and then up at Kakashi.

Kakashi smiles at her.

“I told you,” he taunts, voice lilted in an obnoxious sing-song, and irritation burns through the guilt that had been forming in her eyes.

She whips out his forehead protector, and then throws it at the ground at his feet. Kakashi snorts out a laugh, and flicks it up to his hands with a twitch of his toes.

“Sakura!” Iruka repeats, scandalized.

“I still don’t think he’s a real ninja,” she grumbles under her breath. “How do we know it’s not a henge.”

Still chuckling, Kakashi whips the dirt off his forehead protector by slapping it against his pants a couple times, and then ties it back onto his head.

_ It’s fine _ , Kakashi tells Iruka.

Iruka makes a face, but quickly smooths his expression.

_ Ask her if Mizuki demonstrated the techniques to her. _

“Uh, only transformation,” Sakura says. “He said it was the easiest, so I should start with it.”

There is a flash of fury on Iruka’s face before he smooths it away.

The transformation technique is, of course, the hardest of the academy three. Clones are the easiest to get at least something, and replacement is only a little harder. Transformation is hard enough it should be a full rank above them. Or rather, the other two are so easy they should be a full rank below transformation, if a rank existed below E.

_ Did the seals match? _

“Yeah!” Sakura says. “Actually, wait, that doesn’t make sense. If it was wrong, how did he do it? If it was wrong, how did  _ I _ do it?”

Iruka blinks, and Ino’s mouth falls open.

“You did the transformation technique, Sakura?” Ino says, grabbing Sakura’s arm, and shaking it.

Sakura nods, a little shyly.

“Show me show me!”

Iruka opens his mouth, and Kakashi cuts him off with a quick shake of his head.

There is something purposeful about the jerks of Ino’s hands on Sakura’s arm, jerking her out of, perhaps, realizing that the seals she is about to use are wrong, and shouldn’t work.

Kakashi thinks maybe he’s overthinking it until Ino’s eyes catch his, and her smile slips from her face.

He smiles. The apple really did not fall far from the tree. If only Kakashi had known Inoichi when he was an adorable academy student. That would have been something to see.

Ino takes the scroll from Sakura to free her hands, rerolls it and hands it back to Iruka as Sakura slowly works her way through her three incorrect seals, and once again, Kakashi watches as her chakra forms ram but her body forms snake. She poofs into a perfect copy of Ino, and turns to her with a grin.

Ino, however, is staring at Sakura in open-mouthed shock.

“Did I—Did I get it wrong?”

Sakura’s smile falters.

“No no no,” Ino interrupts, forcing her face into a smile. She grabs Sakura’s hands in her own. “It’s great, you’re great! This is so cool! Just wait until I learn, and then we can switch!”

Sakura smiles like the sun.

When Sakura looks to Iruka for confirmation of her greatness, Ino’s eyes turn to Kakashi, understanding shining in those pupil-less eyes, as well as a little bit of possessiveness.

_ I found her first _ , Ino’s eyes say.  _ She’s mine _ .

That is altogether too strategic (not to mention too old-fashioned) thinking for a seven year old, so he ruffles her hair until she stops and squeals, batting at his hand, trying to escape.

“Hey!” Sakura shouts, when she realizes what’s happening. “Stop that!” She punches his stomach. “Stop! Pervert! Sensei, help, he’s bullying Ino!”

Kakashi stops, lifting his hands into the air to proclaim his own innocence. Sakura glares daggers at him, narrowing her eyes meaningfully.

She grabs Ino, and pulls Ino back away from Kakashi, never letting her eyes leave his.

_ Tell Sakura to remove her jutsu, and go back to their classmates. _

Iruka does, and watches in a sort of muted disbelief as Sakura goes through the transformation technique again, instead of canceling it like a normal human being.

As they leave, their eyes meet again.

“Give me the scrolls,” Kakashi says.

Iruka gives him the scrolls.

“What’s going on?” Iruka asks.

“Mizuki seems to be playing ‘gaslight the civilian children’. Don’t worry, Iruka, I’m sure I can teach him the error of his ways.”

Kakashi smiles at Iruka, and Iruka turns a little green. Whoops. Kakashi must have accidentally smiled his anbu smile.

“But—how could she do it? Mizuki could use the wrong seal, because he’s familiar enough with the technique to drop seals.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Kakashi says airily, and Iruka frowns, his face making it clear he thinks Kakashi knows something he isn’t saying.

That’s the trick, though.

He really has no idea.

“Tell them that Mizuki got called away on an emergency mission,” Kakashi says, and then body-flickers to Mizuki, and then away with him, leaving an illusion of Mizuki receiving a messenger hawk with a scroll and then leaving without a word.

Mizuki struggles, briefly, before he meets the bare fury in Kakashi’s gaze, and instead pisses himself in fear.

So.

If Kakashi is being honest.

He really had not expected to be standing in front of the third Hokage today.

Honestly, even after dragging Mizuki kicking and screaming into T&I, he hadn’t expected the Hokage to care. Maybe Nara Shikaku at worst, but the Hokage?

“I hear a seven-year-old stole your forehead protector today, Kakashi-kun,” the Hokage says with a smirk twisting his lips. “You sure you’re not slipping? I can demote you if you need it, you know.”

The third Hokage snorts, and then bursts into full on laughter.

Now—

Kakashi is pretty sure people who are over sixty years old aren’t allowed to have senses of humor anymore.

Look at Mitokado, Utatane and Danzou.

He’s never seen them so much as smile.

This is bullshit.

Kakashi wants a refund.

Kakashi waits as the third calms himself.

There is a part of him, the part of him that had wanted to stick his tongue straight back out at Sakura when she stuck hers out at him, that wants to say something like—

_ I let her take it _ .

But he fully understands that this would not help his situation in the least.

He’s been getting knowing smirks from every anbu and jounin he’s passed all day today.

You’d think that T&I would be better at keeping secrets, given it’s their damn job.

But apparently, nope!

Slowly, the mirth drips away from the third’s face, and finally, the Third takes a deep breath.

“Tell me what happened, Kakashi-kun.”

Kakashi nods, and does just that. He tells the third about meeting Sakura, from seeing her successfully complete a transformation jutsu with incorrect seals to finding the scrolls Mizuki had given Sakura. He finishes by telling the Hokage what they had learned in T&I: Mizuki’s systematic abuse of students he viewed as lesser—either coming from civilian families, from low-ranking shinobi clans, or simply students he didn’t like, because they spoke back to him or he just hated them on principle. His current victims were Sakura and Naruto, although the shape of his abuse differed between the two.

The third takes his hat from his head, and sighs a long, sad sigh.

“How many students did we lose?”

“T&I estimated it at about fifty-one over the course of the last seven years,” Kakashi says.

The Third leans his head into his hand, and sighs again.

“How did I miss this?”

Iruka missed it, and he’d been standing right next to the fucker, so Kakashi is pretty sure the Hokage is pretty close to the back of the line, as far as responsibility for this is concerned. But the question isn’t really directed at him, so he keeps his mouth shut.

“Thank you for catching this, Kakashi-kun.”

The third Hokage’s eyes are deep and earnest, so Kakashi nods.

“Of course, sir.”

There is a moment of silence between them before the Hokage puts his hat back onto his head.

“You’re interested in the girl?”

“Sakura Haruno,” Kakashi corrected.

The third acknowledges the correction with a nod of his head.

“Yes,” Kakashi said.

“You?” the third asks. “You want a student?”

Kakashi pauses.

Want is a strong word.

But—

He thinks of Rin, control and healing and barely a puddle of chakra—trying to be Tsunade, even though Tsunade had Senju blood in her veins and the chakra pool to match it.

He thinks of Rin, looking into his eyes as she died.

Maybe, if someone had taught her differently, she could have lived.

“Want is a strong word.”

The third raises an eyebrow.

He thinks of his father, career genin for twenty years before he could find the right way to use his chakra.

How the whispers after he saved his team were cold and disdainful—

_ This is what happens when you let career genin start thinking they’re  _ somebody _. _

“If I don’t train her, I worry that no one would. I think I know what she needs to be strong.”

The eyebrow remains raised.

He thinks of Sakura, shaking with tears when she realized how Mizuki had lied to her, as part of her realized he had done it for no other purpose than to hurt her.

He thinks of the excitement in his chest when he had seen her making one seal in her chakra and a different seal with her hands.

Excitement like he hadn’t felt in years.

That feeling of—

If she could do that.

What else could she do?

If he could teach her—

What could she become?

He feels his lips pull up in a smile that is totally unprofessional, too wide and too toothy for a meeting with the Hokage.

“I think she could be the strongest ninja in a generation.”

The Third smiles back, a mirror of unprofessional mania.

The feeling that you might be shaping the ninjas that would define a generation.

For a moment, he sees how the Hokage must have smiled when he realized that he had the three greatest ninja of a generation in his three genin.

Apprenticeship is a fairly archaic concept. It is rife with injustice, nepotism, and abuse. Apprenticeship of non-clan children moreso. Genin are already adults, by ninja law, but academy students are children.

Before the third’s reforms, which introduced the academy, the only way to became a genin was through apprenticeship, and the results were as varied as they were horrible. Clan secrets stolen, children tortured, and then just plain old neglect and abuse. Jounin cannot, as a general rule, be trusted with the care of children.

Now, in this modern world, you need direct approval of the Hokage, consent of the child’s guardians, and consent of the child themself.

Kakashi has two of the three.

The easy two, of course.

In order:

Approval of the Hokage.

Approval of the Haruno family.

Now, for the hard one.

Approval of Sakura herself.

“You!” Sakura hisses when she catches sight of him standing in the shadow of the tree outside the academy gates.

(Her situational awareness is getting better!)

(Progress!)

“Yo!” Kakashi greets brightly, and her scowl deepens.

“Let’s go, Ino,” Sakura says, turning away from Kakashi, trying to drag Ino along behind her.

“Um,” Ino says. “Maybe we should listen to him?”

He can feel Sakura’s irritation from here.

She glowers at Ino, who is slowly pulling her towards Kakashi.

He squats down to their level as they approach, and she frowns up at him.

“You’re still gross and I hate you,” she says, ignoring Ino’s elbows to her side.

Kakashi laughs to himself.

“I want to train you,” Kakashi says, because if this was going to happen in any way, it needs to happen honestly. At Sakura’s side, Ino’s mouth falls open, while Sakura just looks totally mystified. “What you did, when you used the transformation jutsu, despite getting your seals wrong, I’ve never seen that before.” He pulls his forehead protector up, revealing Obito’s sharingan. “And believe me, I’ve seen a lot. I want to see what you could do, given the training you deserve. You could be as strong as the sannin—you could be stronger, I’m sure of it. I’ll make sure of it, I promise you.”

Sakura stares at him, open-mouthed. The confusion in her gaze grows and grows because, well—he’s pretty sure no one has ever told Sakura she could be a ninja before.

Not to mention a  _ good _ ninja.

“Sakura,” Ino says, pulling at her arm.

Sakura turns to Ino, and Ino continues.

“You want to be the strongest kunoichi ever, right?”

Slowly, Sakura nods, while Kakashi swallows his surprise.

“To do that, you need a good teacher.”

“But Inooo,” Sakura says, “he’s the worst. He’s not even a real ninja!”

Kakashi barely holds back a snort.

Ino shakes Sakura a little.

“He is. He’s one of the strongest jounin in the leaf, and he’s never taken another student.”

While all of those things are true, Kakashi really doesn’t like that a  _ seven year old _ knows about them. He maybe needs to talk to Inoichi about what he has been telling his daughter.

Slowly, Sakura turns back to him, and glowers up at him.

“Prove it,” she says mulishly.

_ Sakura _ , Ino whines at her side, but Sakura refuses to be moved.

There are a lot of ways to impress a civilian.

Even more ways to impress a child.

Instead, Kakashi leans down, and picks up a leaf from the ground.

“In five seconds, I want you to punch me,” he says.

A mean little smile quirks at the corner of Sakura’s lips.

“Okay,” she says, cracking her knuckles.

(Seven year olds should not know how to crack their knuckles.)

He flicks the leaf into the air beside him, and performs three sealless jutsus in rapid succession:

Clone.

Transformation.

Replacement.

His dad could do it in the blink of an eye. It takes Kakashi a good two seconds.

It’s thankfully still enough to wow a seven year old.

When Sakura punches him, her punch goes straight through him, dispelling his clone. She spends a moment staring at where he’d been before darting her gaze down to the leaf that had been slowly falling through his clone, and then snapping her gaze over to where he is slowly floating down beside her, transformed into the leaf he had tossed to the side.

He un-transforms, and lands lightly on the ground.

“This is the Hidden in the Leaves Technique. It was one of my father’s two signature techniques. I can teach it to you.”

Sakura leans down, picks up the leaf he switched places with, and rubs her fingers over its surface, as if she can feel the faint traces of his chakra his technique left on it.

Ino, by Sakura’s side, is gaping at him.

“Okay,” Sakura says. “If you teach me how to do that, I’ll be your student.”

He smiles at her ridiculous conditional approval.

And so, for the first time in his life, Kakashi gains a student.


	2. Chapter 2

Kakashi would like to say that he shows up at his first training session with Sakura two hours late—

You know, old ladies to help, porn to read.

Kakashi’s a busy man.

He’s a jounin, you know?

Unfortunately, he isn’t quite that irresponsible.

Instead he arrives early, and then hides, so that he can get all of the benefit of infuriating his new student by arriving late while being able to arrive just before she stomps off in frustration.

She arrives just a little after he does, about ten minutes early. Really, quite punctual. He’ll have to fix that.

The agreed-upon meeting time comes and goes, and she starts getting jittery. He sees a bit of indecision grow on her face—a part of her thinking to herself—is she at the wrong place? did she get the wrong time? And then he sees her face harden as she decides that actually—

Kakashi is just a dick.

Kakashi has to smother his laughter with his Icha-Icha so she doesn’t notice him like five feet away.

You might wonder how Kakashi is so sure that’s what she’s thinking, and not just that she decided to put it out of her mind.

The answer, of course, is because she starts grumbling under her breath.

“Stupid Kakashi. With his stupid hair and his gross face and his stupid...” She pauses, tries to find other parts of him that are stupid. “Hair.”

She stomps a bit. Takes some deep breaths.

“It’s okay. Ino said he’d be late, because he’s the worst.” Kakashi has no idea what he has done to so thoroughly earn the hatred of that particular seven-year-old. Maybe ruffling her hair had been over the line? She did seem to be very particular about it. “She said to not worry if I’m in the wrong place, because he’s a jounin and he could find me. She said he asked to train me.”

She nods, rocking a little.

“It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Kakashi feels a bit guilty. 

“Ino said it’s fine, so it’s fine.”

That’s a remarkable amount of trust, Kakashi notes. It’s something Sakura will need, if she becomes a high-level ninja. He’ll need to make sure that friendship doesn’t wither and die, without the constant forced interaction of the academy. He knows what his early graduation did to his relationships—he’ll need to make sure his student doesn’t repeat his mistakes.

He could invite Ino to train with them every once in a while, for basic training? He doesn’t have any interest in training Ino: she’s destined to be a distance fighter and the head of T&I. She’ll get there with or without him, to say nothing of whether Inoichi would let him interact with his daughter in any way.

Sakura’s head snaps up from her muttering about all manner of horrible things she’d like to do to him, and glares at the forest around her. Kakashi is half expecting her eyes to immediately snap to his hiding place, because it would fit with all of the other bullshit he’s seen from her.

“Kakashi?” she asks, glaring at the forest around her.

Kakashi says nothing, grinning behind his mask and his second favorite copy of Icha-Icha. (Variety is the spice of life, after all.)

“I know you’re there,” she declares, not even a trace of waver in her voice at the blatant lie.

Children are amazing: you have to spend years training a ninja to get them to lie at the same level they used to be able to lie as children.

“If you don’t come out, I’ll  _ leave _ . This was your stupid idea. I could be playing house with Ino right now.”

Don’t laugh don’t laugh.

Don’t laugh.

Kakashi once spent two hours in a closet while two men boasted about their incredible and ridiculous ninja prowess, never letting out a chuckle.

He can do this.

“It was my turn to be Super Mega Beautiful Kunoichi the third!” she shouts. “Ino won’t let me get my turn back because she’s stupid like that!”

What great sacrifices Sakura is making for her training.

“I’ll have to be,” she sighs, like this is the greatest imposition in the world, “the Super Mega Hokage.”

Kakashi has to body-flicker away to laugh.

He body-flickers back a moment later.

“The Hokage is lame,” Sakura says sadly, no longer shouting, having probably forgotten what she was doing, and Kakashi almost gives up his cover right there. He hopes the Third is watching this on his little peeping glass ball. “His hair is stupid.”

Kakashi’s sure that the Third’s three remaining hairs are very offended.

Finally, she winds down, and flops onto her back on the grass, throwing her legs high up into the air above her.

She entertains herself briefly by watching them flail before flipping back to her feet.

“Well,” she says to herself. “If Kakashi is going to be—” she turns to the trees and bellows “—STUPID,” she turns back to the grass, “then I guess I’ll teach myself! I can do his stupid technique, and then I don’t need to be his stupid student.”

Kakashi smiles a real smile under his mask.

She does not pull out the three scrolls he gave her after she accepted his apprenticeship. Three proper scrolls on the academy three. (The ones Mizuki gave her are still locked up in evidence somewhere in T&I.) In fact, she doesn’t even have them with her.

Slowly, meticulously, she makes the seal for dog, boar, and then she hesitates. Finally, she does ram, and poofs into Ino. She looks down at herself, and then around, and then wanders over to the pond. She looks at her reflection, and then giggles as she pokes at Ino’s cheeks.

She almost giggles herself straight into the pond.

She brings her hands together in the simple breaking seal, and the transformation technique dispels in a poof of smoke.

Sakura, however, was apparently not prepared for the shock of breaking the technique, and falls directly into the pond. Kakashi takes the moment in which she is fully submersed in the pond to cough out a chuckle.

Sakura comes out sputtering and furious, glaring at the whole world around her like it’s their fault for her inability to handle a mild chakra shock. She crawls onto the grass, and flops onto her back. She blows ineffectually at where her pink hair is plastered to her face. She unties her sopping wet ribbon, flings it behind her in a fit of pique, and slicks her hair back from her face.

“Why does anyone ever dispel the transformation jutsu,” she grouses. “This sucks.” She frowns. “And it’s  _ Kakashi’s _ fault,” she adds as a hissed afterthought.

Yeah, Kakashi is 100% willing to take responsibility for this. It might be his greatest accomplishment.

Kakashi watches and waits as Sakura lies there on the ground, eyes vaguely following the pages before him as he slowly pages through his book. This Icha-Icha is a bit homoerotic. The boys are making lots of eye contact in this threesome. There’s a bit of naked roughhousing. It’s very steamy. Kakashi dreams one day there will be a 100% gay Icha-Icha. He’s pretty sure Jiraiya will get there eventually.

Sakura, after about five minutes, heaves herself to her feet, and does the transformation technique again, with a little less hesitation on the last seal this time.

Ino again.

More excited giggling.

“I’m so pretty,” Sakura exclaims, dancing on the shore of the pond and flapping her hands. She runs her hands through her short hair. “My hair is so soft!” She squeals, and almost falls into the pond again before scrambling back.

Kakashi silently curses.

So close.

Sakura, being a seven-year-old and therefore having the attention span of a gnat, quickly tires of being Ino. Another transformation technique, seals just a hair messier than the last, and she poofs into–

Him.

Well.

She looks into the pond, pulls down her mask, and makes a face.

“Gross,” she decides. She flaps his hands in a decidedly little-girl manner. “Gross gross gross.” She dances away from the lake, and breaks the jutsu with a seal.

It still shocks her onto the ground. This concerns Kakashi enough that he pulls his forehead protector up to reveal Obito’s Sharingan.

She cycles through what seems to be everyone she knows, which includes, but is not limited to: the grandson of the Inuzuka matriarch, the Hyuuga heir, and the Nara heir. He should… maybe tell her about the customs around transforming into other people.

For example: don’t turn into clan heirs of clans that can kill you.

On the other hand. He could not? He’d like to see Hiashi’s face when he sees his heir giggling to herself and poking at her eyes saying “This is weird, why are Hinata’s eyes so creepy, grosssssss.”

He briefly distracts himself by imagining what Shikaku would do if he saw his son dancing around giggling, and then doing a couple of cartwheels just for kicks and giggles.

He has to body-flicker away to cover his laugh again.

When he’s back, Sakura is Naruto, and it punches him straight in the gut. She’s Naruto, and she appears to have forgotten about it, staring at a leaf.

“Kakashi was able to turn into a leaf,” she is muttering to herself.

Kakashi hesitates. Inanimate object transformations are hard, and he’s heard horror stories of academy students trapped as inanimate objects because they can’t perform a sealless release.

Really, what are the chances she gets it on her first try?

Stupid question. Her physical seals are as messy and clumsy as her chakra seals are flawless, and she vanishes in a puff of smoke, replaced with a slowly falling leaf.

Transforming into inanimate objects is hard, but it is simply a matter of perfect technique and an impeccable mental image. Both of which he already knew she had.

He is already on his feet on the branch he is hiding on, hesitating, watching the leaf that is Sakura slowly spin through the air. With Obito's Sharingan, he can see that her replica is a perfect match for the leaf she had been studying. All leaves are different, Obito's Sharingan is happy to tell him, but those two are the same.

If she hits the ground without dispelling the technique, he tells himself, he’ll break it for her.

Slowly, she falls, and Kakashi can’t even distract himself with Icha-Icha, with Ryouji and Kenta sitting in the hot springs together, arguing over Mako-san, occasionally getting into naked wrestling matches over her affections.

Sakura breaks out of the technique the moment before the leaf hits the ground, her chest heaving as she kneels on the ground. She isn’t hyperventilating, but only just.

“I did it. That wasn’t scary. I did it I did it I did it I did it i—” she sucks in a deep breath, and flops onto her back, and then grins at the sky. “I did it!” She wiggles, whacking the grass around her as she flails.

She struggles to her feet, fumbles her way through the transformation technique, and fuck, is she doing it again? She’s going to fucking kill him. Is this what it was like for Minato?

_ May you be cursed with a brilliant student _ , Minato had told him.

For the first time since Minato’s death, Kakashi manages a good mental fuck you to his old teacher. It feels good. He used to do that a lot, before his death went and ripped a hole in Kakashi’s chest.

Thankfully, Sakura just poofs into Ino. Then, a moment later, the jutsu breaks, and she stumbles.

Now, with Obito's Sharingan open, he can see what is staggering her—

It is the chakra that the jutsu had been built out of, the chakra he could see running over her skin, holding her form, getting sucked back into her as the jutsu breaks.

Which is uhhh.

New.

That’s new.

Kakashi hasn’t seen that before.

That isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

He can feel a grin start to curl at his lips beneath his mask, and has to fight to get it under control.

Sakura giggles and jumps in celebration of her seal-less break, and then proceeds to do it over and over again.

It’s not all of the chakra, he can see, as she kindly demonstrates it to him over and over again. He’s spent quite a bit of time studying jutsu—it helps with the copying, especially on the field, when he’s copying his opponent’s jutsus as an intimidation tactic—so he knows that the transformation technique has two parts: one is the initiation, a burst of chakra to change the shape, and the second is the holding, the a second burst of chakra which covers the user, and then holds them in the shape they’ve turned into. The better the user’s chakra control, the less chakra they “leak”. To his eyes, it doesn’t look like Sakura is leaking  _ any _ , which if true, would be extraordinary, but he would need a Hyuuga to confirm, because the Sharingan isn’t sensitive enough to tell. Now, if he can trust Obito’s Sharingan (and he’s never doubted it), then it looks like Sakura is only reclaiming the second burst. He can see the chakra on her skin burst off of her when her jutsu breaks, and then rush back into her a moment later, which causes her to stagger.

Meanwhile, below him, Sakura is spending only moments transformed before breaking her jutsu. He can see her start to flag a little, her tiny puddle of chakra slowly being drained from that first burst of the transformation technique.

He is not prepared for her to vanish into a leaf again. Thank the Sage he’d had Obito’s Sharingan out, because he might have lost her in the leaves around her.

There was no need to worry, because a moment later, she bursts back into herself. After she’s done it five, ten times, he is relaxed enough to turn his attention back to Ryouji and Kenta’s competing stories of how incredibly well they fucked Mako.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sakura flop onto her back, chest heaving. He checks the sky, and it’s been maybe thirty minutes. Her exhaustion looks like low-level chakra exhaustion, which means he overestimated her reserves by maybe a factor of two, maybe one point five. That’s not a great sign. They’ll grow slowly but steadily over the next couple years, particularly if she trains like this, and then dramatically in puberty, but even with that, frequent D-rank use in long fights will probably exhaust her, even in adulthood.

Thankfully, he’s confident he can get her to jounin with E-ranks, but it does hamper his dream of an apprentice for all of his stolen jutsus.

His target is to be about two hours late, so he lets her rest, his Icha-Icha finishing in a glorious threesome. He seals it away, pulls out the sequel. He sees Sakura’s eyes snap to his hiding place when he activates the seal, and he smiles.

A native sensor, huh? He can do things with that.

She pulls herself to her feet, and wanders over to the tree he is no longer in because he is not an idiot, and glares up at the empty branch. Her suspicious eyes roam the trees, and she says “I know you’re out there,” she says, her lie not shaking her voice even a little.

Kakashi remains smugly silent, and she walks back to the middle of the clearing.

He’s watching out of the corner of his eye as she starts a new jutsu Ram, Snake—

Kakashi straightens, raises Obito's Sharingan to focus on her.

Tiger.

Smoke poofs next to Sakura, a fairly limp copy of herself, droopy and grey as Obito's Sharingan watches Sakura just piss chakra away into the air.

Kakashi grimaces, and Sakura staggers. She breaks the jutsu seal-lessly, and most of the chakra she’d pissed away slams back into her, dropping her back onto her ass.

She frowns.

“At least I made one this time,” she grumbles.

Kakashi frowns. Watches closer as she works through the three seals of the clone technique, pissing chakra away the whole time, and unlike the transformation technique, where her hand seals had been clumsy while the seals in her chakra were flawless, they’re both messy now.

Another droopy, grey Sakura, and this is what he was expecting from an academy student, but. What changed? Why had she been able to manage a perfect henge with incorrect seals, but could barely manage a clone with the correct seals?

She breaks it again, repeats. Again, and again. She doesn’t improve. She tries to pay more attention to her seals but she simply doesn’t have the physical dexterity for the precise hand movements. (It’s why they don’t teach jutsu until the third year, and why they teach the girls flower weaving.)

She tires of failing the clone technique, and moves onto the replacement technique, using a leaf, which.

Kakashi wants to take a moment.

The replacement technique is a supremely bullshit technique. It is perhaps  _ the most bullshit  _ technique. Granted, all the academy three are supremely bullshit techniques. For example, the clone technique is not a genjutsu. It is just an image. In the air. You can see through it with the byakugan because people are terrible at faking their tenketsu systems, and therefore the fake is obvious, but not because they can see through it. Clones are real in every way except the teeny tiny little fact that they don’t really exist. You can only detect a perfect clone by shoving your hand in it. ...making it a light-distortion technique, and the only one below A rank. The transformation technique? Also not a genjutsu. The user's form literally changes, but oh, it doesn’t stop there. If you get smaller, you get lighter! If you get bigger, you don’t get heavier. Where does the extra mass go? No one knows. What does that make it? Space-time ninjutsu. It is one of the only three that aren’t forbidden. The second is the Summoning Technique. The third?

The replacement technique.

Here’s a primer, because there’s a zero percent change you know how it works if you’re anything below jounin: you tag an object of similar-ish size to you (exact numbers are bullshit and therefore omitted) with your chakra. Then you do the technique, and the chakra tag will inexplicably perform it with you. Then a chakra string (A rank technique, by the way) forms between you and your target and then you instantaneously swap places, traveling none of the space in-between. (Space-time ninjutsu.) Interrupt the string with foreign chakra, like, say, a hand? Jutsu fails. Interrupt the string with an an inanimate object, like, say, a severed hand? Jutsu succeeds.

Look, point is. There’s a size requirement. Nobody knows why. Nobody’s ever broken it. About 5x volume? About 10x mass? There are exact numbers but Kakashi is too offended by how bullshit they are to remember them. Closer you are, faster everything is. (Don’t ask why, you can never ask why.) 

Sakura and the leaf would definitely break the size requirements. You want to swap with a leaf? First transform into one, and then swap. (People never figured out Sakumo’s Hidden in the Leaves technique for a reason: sealless smokeless transformation - sealless smokeless replacement - smokeless break is a totally unreasonable sequence only his father would ever think of.)

Part of Kakashi is on the edge of his seat, waiting to see Sakura do something new that’s totally stupid and unreasonable, but this time, he’s disappointed.

Sakura fails twenty-four times in a row. He’s a bit impressed she kept trying that long, if he’s honest. Finally, she stomps off into the forest, like the basic rules of the ninjutsu she’s trying to learn have fundamentally offended her, and gets a branch of appropriate size.

Take two, and now she succeeds about one in ten times. He’s a bit impressed she continued trying after failing nine times, but the success rate is still abysmal. She only succeeds in tagging the leaf with chakra before executing the technique one in three times, which is something he would have expected her ridiculous control to help her with.

The only place she seems to improve is in handling the blowback of sucking her chakra back up out of the air when she pisses it out. He’s happy she seems to be working out that out on her own, because he has never seen it before and therefore has no idea how to teach her to handle it.

By the time she reaches the hour mark, half an hour of the failing and failing and failing, she looks like she’s about to cry, so he decides to drop from the tree and reveal himself.

“Yo!” he greets, and all of her frustration at herself is immediately redirected at him.

She bares her teeth at him in a feral scowl and bellows “You’re late!”

“I had to help an old lady cross the street,” he responds. “Even Jounin need to take the occasional emergency D-rank every once in a while.”

Her scowl does not abate, and she bends down to scrabble at the ground.

He frowns, and then sidesteps the rock she chucks at him.

There are two more rocks in her hands, and she’s still glaring like she’d really like for them to be in his face.

“Now, now,” he says, hands up.

This was apparently the wrong thing to say, because that makes her pitch the rocks at him. He catches them, tosses one over his shoulder, and tosses the other in a slow, high arc towards her.

She looks up at it just in time for him to swap with it, and fall to a stop directly before her.

She looks rather begrudgingly impressed, and only makes a couple of attempts at his forehead protector.

“So, did you read those scrolls I gave you?”

She frowns mulishly and then grinds out “Yes.”

“But you didn’t practice them without my supervision?” he asks.

Sakura stares up at him with the face of an angel.

“Of course not,” she says, and wow. Children really are just incredible liars. Not a pause, not a twitch.

Just amazing.

He’s so proud.

“Show me.”

Sakura makes a face.

“Show me, first! How do I know you can actually do it?” He raises an eyebrow. “With the seals!”

Ohh.

Although giving in to her ridiculous demands doesn’t set a great standard, he’s kind of already set a precedent when he had to bribe her with a secret clan technique to let him teach her.

He makes the ram seal, then the snake seal, and then the tiger seal, carefully forming his chakra with each seal, and Sakura’s green eyes bore into him, drinking in his every motion.

He completes the jutsu, and a clone poofs into existence to his right. He high-fives it, careful to make sure their hands don’t actually touch (and therefore destroy his clone).

He breaks the jutsu mentally because she’s clearly already got a handle on that, and watches with Obito's Sharingan as the chakra in his clone vanishes into nothingness. He has no idea how he would even begin to suck that chakra back into himself.

He turns back to Sakura, and gives her an eye-smile. “Your turn,” he says.

She gives him the stink eye, and then makes a sloppy ram seal. With Obito's Sharingan, he can see an equally sloppy chakra seal, and swallows back his urge to frown.

But then Sakura frowns and shakes her head.

“No,” she mutters, and her chakra ripples as she wipes the seal away.

Again, and again.

Kakashi resists his urge to taunt her, because she would definitely rise to the bait.

He watches as her ram seal becomes cleaner, less sloppy, while her hand seals fail to get any less clumsy.

That same bizarre dissonance of her hands doing one thing and her chakra doing another ripples through Kakashi.

“You know,” Kakashi offers. “You don’t actually need the seals.”

Sakura stops.

She glares balefully up at him.

He holds his hands in front of her, fingers wiggling just to be obnoxious, and slowly forms his chakra into the forms for Ram, Snake, and Tiger.

Fun fact: Seal-less techniques aren’t actually mentally forming seals. Seals are a way to transform chakra into the required shapes, but their shapes are rigid. You only have 12 “letters”, while chakra can take any form. The chakra flow of a true seal-less jutsu is a single uninterrupted flow, rather than being broken into a distinct sequence of letters. It’s why it can be faster, and more efficient.

Kakashi isn’t doing that. He does his best to form his chakra into the shape of the seals, one by one.

It’s hard, but Kakashi’s kind of incredible at this whole ninjutsu thing. Also he has Obito’s Sharingan, which lets him literally see the chakra as he shapes it. The Sharingan, as he liked to say before he had Obito’s, is totally cheating. (Now, of course, it’s totally legitimate.)

He’ll see if Sakura can copy a proper seal-less jutsu with the replacement technique.

A clone appears next to him in a puff of smoke, and Kakashi faux-high fives it again.

Sakura rushes forward, and wraps her hands around his.

Kakashi raises his eyebrow at her.

“You could be using a genjutsu,” she hisses. “I don’t trust you.”

He’ll need to work on that. Hopefully it will come with time. It did with him and Minato.

He does it again, and he can feel Sakura’s eyes boring into his chest, where he is forming his seals. He wonders what her eyes see, if they’re seeing anything.

Another clone, another faux-high five.

“Satisfied?” Kakashi asks.

Her green gaze is full of hate as she releases his hands.

“I guess,” she says.

Then, without bothering with her horrible hand seals, Kakashi watches with Obito’s Sharingan as Sakura slowly works her way through the clone technique.

Ram, stop.

Ram, stop.

Ram, snake, stop.

Ram, snake, stop.

It takes her fifty-three tries.

When she completes it, the chakra flow is flawless, and the resulting clone is similarly perfect.

Kakashi smothers a smile behind his mask as Sakura leaps with joy, and jumps to give her clone a double high-five—

And then promptly falls through it, landing on her face on the ground when her clone disperses into nothing (and, of course, all of its remaining chakra vanishing into Sakura).

This might be the greatest day of his life.

Sakura pulls her face out of the grass and glares at him with murder in her eyes.

Kakashi laughs out loud, and steps back when she lunges for his legs.

“You’re a terrible teacher!” she yells at him. “Why are you so mean!”

He dances back, continuing to laugh, and then replaces himself with a clone when Sakura dives at him, causing her to fall to the ground and eat dirt once again.

Kakashi is having just the greatest day.

Sakura picks up some dirt and throws it at him because she’s, you know. Seven.

She’s about to lunge at him when he says, in his best imitation of Minato’s teacher voice—

“Again.”

She stops, glares mulishly at him, and then obeys.

Five tries this time, before a copy of Sakura appears beside her and then rushes to attack him.

He blinks as the clone crashes into him and disperses. He watches the chakra of the clone waver in the air for a bit, and then race across the ten feet between them to get sucked back into Sakura. Sage’s horns.

What on earth is this child?

Sakura is smirking at him.

He quirks his eyebrow. “Is that all you’ve got?”

Four tries, then three, then three again and she is a little pale with exhaustion before she gets all the way through the jutsu on her first try.

All of the clones, of course, immediately attack him.

Her chest is heaving, but she is grinning viciously at him. She looks very proud of herself. Which, in all honesty, she should be. But Kakashi is too emotionally stunted to acknowledge this aloud.

Instead, he closes the distance between them as she glares at him suspiciously. He places his hand on her back above a conveniently large tenketsu, and gives her a minor chakra infusion. Ideally, you’d use the one on the stomach right above the recipient’s chakra reserves, but uhh. No. It’s a useful technique in the field for giving comrades just enough chakra to run home. For Sakura, it is a full chakra infusion, and she straightens in surprise.

The technique is horribly inefficient: Tsunade can do 10:1, but she invented the technique and is also one of the best ninja to have ever lived. Kakashi manages about 100:1, which he thinks puts him in about third place (Tsunade is a freak of fucking nature). So he can still feel the hit to his chakra stores like a punch to the gut, even with Sakura’s literal teaspoon of chakra.

She glances up at him, her eyes considering.

“Maybe you’re not…  _ the worst _ ,” she says, voice grudging, but eyes, for the first time today, not filled with hate.

Good day, good day.

He has Sakura repeat the clone technique a couple more times for good measure, before he has her stop.

For all of her grousing about what a horrible, gross, nasty, stupid human being he is, she doesn’t grouse about the repetition. When he had seen her in that garden, how many times had she used the transformation jutsu? With only Mizuki’s half-assed demonstration, how many times had she had to try before she got it right?

Alone, with nothing but a horrible, abusive scroll to go by.

He remembers from back when his father had trained him:

_ You’re rushing, Kakashi— _

_ Nothing good ever happens quickly. _

_ Just look at the Uchiha. _

“Okay,” Kakashi says, clapping his hands together.

Sakura, halfway through her jutsu, narrows her eyes, and completes it anyways.

Kakashi ignores the rabid attack from the clone, and body-flickers away to gather a log for practicing the replacement jutsu.

Sakura’s eyes light up briefly before she remembers that she hates him, and narrows them again. He sets the log on the ground about twenty feet to his left, then holds his hands in front of him.

“Watch closely,” he says, and she scoffs with all the contempt of a seven-year-old.

This time, he does not work through the seals with his chakra. He tags the log with his chakra, holds it in his view, and then he slowly pushes his chakra through the seal-less replacement jutsu, his chakra flowing through the smooth contours of a proper seal-less jutsu.

The world shears in that really unpleasant way it does when you vanish in one place and reappear in another, and Kakashi finds Sakura glaring at him.

“What’s that?” she asks

“It’s the replacement jutsu.”

She narrows her eyes.

“It’s not. It felt different.”

Kakashi swaps back with the log, and she snaps her head back to his new location.

“What?” he asks, squatting down to her level so she can see the smirk in his eyes. “Don’t think you can do it?”

Sakura’s eyes blaze, and her teeth pull back from her lips in an adorably furious snarl.

“Do it again,” she orders.

He does. Tag, look, swap.

“Again.”

“Again.”

“Again.”

She has him do it twelve times, before she nods to herself in a very self-satisfied harrumph. She steps away from him, frowns.

She looks back at him.

“Again.”

Six times later, and then she nods again.

It takes her five times to get the tag right.

And then second by second, he watches as she works her way through the jutsu. The smile on his lips is truly un-shinobi-like.

“Again,” she says, when she’s about halfway through, like she has to confirm.

And then, finally, Sakura vanishes, and a log appears in her place.

Kakashi positively cackles.

Sakura looks at him with a scrunchy scowl, and he cackles louder.

His seven-year-old apprentice just performed a seal-less replacement technique on her first try!

The first time she finished the jutsu, it worked.

As he cackles, Sakura looks at him like he’s gone insane, and eventually grabs the log from in front of him and drags it away, so she can practice more in peace.

On her tenth attempt, she succeeds again.

Un-fucking-believable.

His apprentice is going to turn the whole damn shinobi world on its ass.

And Kakashi’s going to be the one who makes it happen.

The first day, Kakashi works with her until the sun is going down, and she can get the replacement jutsu consistently in three tries.

He is down almost all of his chakra stores from the five chakra transfusions and is forced to walk home like a civilian, but he doesn’t care.

Over the next month, he teaches Sakura the seal-less transformation technique, the seal-less clone technique, and he drills her until she can perform them consistently, nine times out of ten.

In the mornings on which he arrives late, he watches as she tries to perform Hidden in the Leaves.

Some days, she manages to swap with a leaf before it hits the ground.

Some days, she manages to be still enough that she does not appear doubled with her clone.

Never both at once, though.

The seal-less techniques are a good start, but she’ll need speed before she can do anything with them.

And never once does she complain, wanting more techniques, flashier jutsus.

(Not like he did, when his father trained him.)

She just wants these, faster.

Kakashi smiles behind his mask.

As variety, he sprinkles in some other techniques:

He has her walk up trees, which she gets on her third try, which is just. Outrageous.

Then he has her water walk, which takes her at least a day, which is only slightly less outrageous. He drones to her from the academy textbooks while she practices, because she’ll need to be a genin eventually, has her learn at least the rudimentary basics of kunai and shuriken (she’s still horrible, but not so horrible she’ll fail—she’ll improve, eventually). Once she’s got water walking down, he entertains himself by cannonballing into the pond until it stops dumping her into the water. Sand-walking without leaving a trail, grass walking without bending a blade of grass. All of which she gets in under a day each, which remains totally outrageous.

Her chakra reserves slowly increase, and to his surprise, so do his, just a little. Turns out having to give a child five full infusions a day is more chakra than he’s used to expending.

He spies on her occasionally when she leaves, and is comforted to see she often stops by Ino’s on her way home. They sometimes collect flowers for Ino’s family flower shop, and so he tries to let her out early and not too tired on those days.

He trains her on detecting Genjutsu, sitting her down and subtly altering the world around her. She is horrible at finding subtle changes in her environment, but once he teaches her that all genjutsu is internal, about twisting the chakra in the victim, she becomes very unsettlingly good at it. He has to resort to using Obito's Sharingan, because he’s otherwise actually pretty shit at genjutsu. He teaches her Genjutsu Cancellation, how to break genjutsu without resorting to a kai—untangle the jutsu inside of you, and cause the whole damn thing to unravel. Something no one uses because kais are easier and faster, but it’s good practice for learning your own chakra flow.

He has her run, and practice taijutsu, both of which she hates with every fiber of her being, and complains about constantly. It is his first exposure to “come on, teach me something cooler”. It had to happen sometime.

He ignores her complaints, and she does it anyways.

After the first month, he has her spar. She likes trying to get his forehead protector. (That hasn’t stopped.)

So that’s what he has her do.

The academy three, the taijutsu she is very begrudgingly learning, the kunai and shuriken she gets better at every day.

He uses no jutsu, moves at the speed of a chuunin, and tells her that if she wants it so bad, she should just try and take it.

Three months in, and she is very clearly genin-level. This is not a surprise: any eight-year-old can become a genin with six months of training. The Academy runs to twelve because Konoha likes to avoid child soldiers. The ninja that become genin at her age are obviously brilliant, strong and powerful and almost chuunin. (Itachi, him, Shinzou, Fuu, Jirou.)

Sakura is not that.

She’s genin-level.

She has chuunin-level ability at breaking genjutsu (higher than that, really) and at seal-less techniques, but is slow and weak as any academy student and has the chakra of a hummingbird. She could beat an average rookie genin, but nothing much more than that.

He consults the Hokage and, a day later, finds himself in the Hokage’s office.

When Kakashi quit Anbu, he had been hoping that would mean he’d spend less time in this damn office.

Apparently not.

He wonders how often Minato got called into the Third’s office because of him.

The third is staring at him, hands folded under his chin, meeting Kakashi’s gaze.

“You want to promote her to genin?” the Hokage asks.

“I do,” Kakashi confirms.

“She’s eight,” the Hokage says, and his gaze is severe.

_ What about Itachi _ , he doesn’t say.

The Uchiha have special rules: standards of ordinary decency don’t apply to them.

“She has demonstrated the competency required of a genin,” he says instead, recognizing the weasel words for what they are.

The Hokage’s quirked brow tells Kakashi what he thinks of that excuse.

“Tell me what she’s capable of.”

Kakashi is about 90% sure the Hokage already knows, but tells him anyways.

“I hear she’s stolen your forehead protector twice.”

Kakashi resists the urge to scowl.

He’d been hoping that nobody saw that.

She had transformed into an adult civilian, and, while she passed him, she had had a clone of herself signal some children in an alley just in front of him to scream bloody murder.

When he body-flickered towards the alley, she had hooked a finger under the back of his forehead protector, and used his own momentum to tear it from his head.

It had taken him an hour to find her and get her to give it back to him.

The second time she had exchanged herself with his Icha-Icha and then gotten to it before he could, and the only way he could think of to stop her from opening it had been by bribing her with his forehead protector.

Even Kakashi has standards. He’s had to move to pirate manga, instead of porn, so that she can’t do that again.

Arguably, he should never have been reading porn in front of a seven-year-old, but still.

The third Hokage has a good, hearty laugh at Kakashi’s expense, before the humor drips off his face, and his gaze bores into Kakashi.

“Explain yourself, Kakashi-kun.”

“She wants to be a kunoichi, and even now, I don’t think she really believes she can become one, especially with what she’s learned about what Mizuki did. This is growing on her over time, and she doesn’t believe me when I tell her she can become a shinobi. I’m concerned about her slipping away. I don’t think she would be willing to stay as my student without a rank until she’s twelve, and if we can’t wait until then, then promoting her according to her skill seems appropriate.”

“You brought this upon yourself, Kakashi-kun,” the Third intones.

Kakashi is perfectly aware of this, but he stands by his decision. Everything the academy teaches is trivial for her. She would have wasted five years doing nothing.

“Yes, sir.”

The third hums.

“Konoha does not like child soldiers, but we do make exceptions for the exceptional. Tell me, Kakashi. Is Sakura exceptional?”

“Yes,” Kakashi says, without hesitation. Even with the full-force of a Sharingan behind them, she can break out of genjutsu in under a minute. Not fast enough in the field, but still extraordinary.

“Prove it.”

Kakashi’s eyebrows rise.

“You’re playing that game with her. Keep away the forehead protector.” The Third’s lips quirk up in the faintest hint of a smirk. “Has she won yet?”

Kakashi shakes his head. Not in the context of a spar, at least.

“Tell her that that is her final test. Tell her that if she takes your forehead protector, she can keep it.” The Third is still smirking, so Kakashi very carefully does not ask where he would get a replacement. “I’ll have an off-duty jounin observe you. I’m sure they’d love to see the great Kakashi fall to a child.”

Kakashi suppresses a groan, and the Third’s smirk widens.

“Chuunin speed, no jutsus. Don’t cheat. We’ll be watching. If your apprentice can do that, then I’ll let you promote her.” The smirk falls from his face, and he speaks very seriously. “You’re dismissed, Kakashi-kun.”

Kakashi bows his head, and body-flickers away.

The following day, Kakashi is standing in the third training ground when Sakura arrives, and the look she gives him is priceless. It makes him wish he had Obito’s Sharingan out, so he could preserve it forever.

Off to his right, Kurenai stands, leaned against a tree. She is probably wrapped in a genjutsu, although he appreciates that she’s been kind enough to leave him out of it. With Obito’s Sharingan covered, he might have been able to see through it, but, then again, this is Kurenai, so maybe he wouldn’t have.

Kakashi smiles.

“Yo!”

Sakura narrows her eyes at him suspiciously, and he recognizes her searching-for-genjutsu face. Which is wow, super hurtful.

She blinks, and then jabs her finger at him.

“Hah!” she says.

When he is still there, she blinks, and then turns to look at Kurenai, who looks faintly flummoxed, her genjutsu having been cancelled by an eight-year-old. Sakura’s eyes widen, and he watches as she curls into herself.

“Who—” she whispers to him, “Who is that?”

“She’s a spy,” he says in a low voice. “Sent to spy on us from the Hokage.”

Sakura uncurls a bit at that and frowns at him.

“The Hokage didn’t send someone to spy on us.”

“Um, he’s kind of right,” Kurenai offers, from her position next to the tree.

Sakura’s eyes widen, and she moves a little closer to Kakashi.

“I’ve talked to the Hokage,” Kakashi says, crouching in front of her. “And he says that if you can take my forehead protector, you can keep it.”

Sakura’s eyes snap to his, and there is fire in them.

“You’re not lying?”

“No,” he says, doing his best to look serious, even though it hurts him on the inside.

“You better not be lying. I won’t forgive you if you’re lying to me.”

Her eyes are dead serious.

“He’s not,” Kurenai offers. “I’m here to make sure he doesn’t go easy on you.”

Sakura looks to Kurenai, and then back to him.

“And you’ve got to get it first,” he says, and watches as her face screws up in tiny, increasingly less-impotent rage.

She keeps on glaring at him for just a hair too long and he dives forward when a tiny hand tries to grab at his forehead protector from behind.

Sakura lands on the grass, not a single blade of grass bending.

She huffs in frustration.

“You have to put in more effort than that,” Kakashi taunts, as if she hadn’t almost gotten him. Turns out, it’s really hard to track someone by chakra when they barely have any. “I’m a jounin.”

“I still don’t believe that,” Sakura hisses, running through the seals for the clone jutsu and then disappearing.

Fuck, that’s annoying. It’s remarkably hard to unlearn how to react to a sealed pattern because normal ninja can’t seal one technique and use another. He dashes forward at a nice leisurely chuunin pace and hears growled mutters from behind him as Sakura crashes into the ground. He comes to a stop in the center of the clearing, nice and far from things she can swap herself with.

When he last timed her replacement jutsu, she was averaging at two seconds. She’s pretty clearly at a little over a second now, which means that this exercise is already having some of the positive effects he was hoping for.

Just to rub it in, he dips into his pocket, and pulls out the latest volume of the Luffy Pirates. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her eyes glitter with glee, and drops the book a moment before she swaps with it, hands reaching up at his forehead protector.

He slams his hand into her chest, and throws her back. He winces, but she doesn’t, just baring her teeth in frustration, vanishing before she hits the tree behind her. He scans the area, and finds her chewing on her thumb in the branches of one of the trees.

He throws a shuriken at her, and it goes straight on through her, Sakura’s clone vanishing with a pop.

Kakashi grins under his mask.

He’d been planning on losing in as convincing a manner as possible, but—

Sakura has never fought like this before. She doesn’t normally hide. She throws rocks, and tries to swap with her rocks. She runs at him and scrabbles at his arms, trying to get at his forehead protector.Now he wants to see what she’ll do if she really, re

ally wants it.

He ducks his head back and forth, making sure he paints all 360 degrees around him with every pass. He searches his memory for what this clearing looked like before he had entered it, and there is one rock, not too far to his right, that wasn’t here when he got here. But without Obito's Sharingan, he can’t recognize the subtle differences in the rocks, so she could have swapped with another rock.

He grins widely under his mask, and says, “I know you’re a rock, Sakura, do you really think you can fool me with that?”

Silence.

He feels the spark of chakra that is Sakura tagging his forehead protector with her chakra, and smothers it with his own.

He’s pretty sure he isn’t imagining her outrage. He definitely hadn’t told her that you could do that.

One of the rocks replaces itself with a leaf, and he laughs. “You can’t fool me with that,” he says.

One by one, all the rocks in the clearing are replaced with leaves.

He moves towards the center of the clearing, the furthest place from all of the leaves around him.

He looks right, he looks left, and—

He dives forward when he hears the telltale whoosh of something small transforming into something human-sized.

Sakura growls in Kurenai’s voice behind him, hand closed on thin air. She holds Kakashi’s gaze as he backs away from her, and he darts to the side when, right on time, she lashes out at him from behind, her clone still standing staring blankly at where he’d been.

As he moves irregularly through the clearing, mentally running through one of the many random number sequences he memorized back in Anbu for exactly this purpose, he glances at the feet of the Kurenai clone Sakura has yet to dispel. He doesn’t see anything obvious, and glances at the clearing as a whole as Sakura screams bloody murder in Kurenai’s voice at being unable to predict his movements.

This time, he sees her untransform, and is left mildly speechless when she surges up from a broken blade of grass. The ground is, of course, littered with broken blades of grass.

Sage’s Horns on a stick.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Kurenai gape, open-mouthed at Sakura’s antics. To say that Sakura is a powerful ninja would be incorrect. A simple wind or fire jutsu would blow all of her detritus away. Basic taijutsu and a will to injure would let you counter-attack and remove her permanently from the fight.

Still.

This was an expression of skill no academy student—no genin had any right to possess.

Finally, Sakura stopped, glaring balefully at him from Kurenai’s red eyes.

“You’re the worst,” she says.

“I haven’t even used a jutsu!” Kakashi says brightly, continuing to dash randomly around. “I haven’t even left the clearing.”

Sakura makes an angry sound in the back of Kurenai’s throat, and Kurenai shifts uncomfortably, as many do when they see their own body possessed by an eight-year-old child.

Sakura looks pensive, but he does not confuse this with Sakura actually being pensive. Sure enough, she tries and fails to snare him while her clone continues to look pensively at nothing. Sakura is starting to look fairly winded, and she cancels both her transformation and all her clones, and sucks the chakra back into herself, her color visibly improving as she does so.

Kakashi does not stop moving, but keeps his eye on Sakura’s tiny form as she watches him move.

She eventually shakes her head, and stomps off into the forest. He hears the distinct sound of leaves being ripped from trees, and laughs.

“Don’t laugh at me!” she bellows from the trees. “I’m gonna get you!”

He laughs harder. He gets a wordless yell of fury in response.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Asuma body-flicker to a tree beside Kurenai, nodding at her and giving him a cocky wave. Other trees around the clearing also get their corresponding jounin, including—

Oh Sage’s hairy balls.

“I believe in you, glorious rival! I believe you can defeat an eight-year-old academy student!”

Guy gives him a thumbs up. Snickers ripple through the assembled jounin.

The thing is. Guy doesn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body. He is definitely trying to be  _ supportive _ .

Which is definitely worse than just coming to make fun of him.

Kakashi swallows an aggravated sigh.

“Don’t you have anything better to be doing?” Kakashi asks.

“I really, really don’t,” Shikaku says, covering a yawn with a hand. “The clouds are boring today.”

At least the Hokage isn’t here, Kakashi can’t help but think, despite the fact that he’s sure that the fucker’s watching him.

Sakura stomps back into the clearing, hands full of leaves, and then stops dead at the sight of the twelve assembled jounin. Color rises in her cheeks.

“Woo, go Sakura,” Asuma offers in a monotone, giving a weak fist pump.

The slow hunching of Sakura’s shoulders stops, and she starts to smile shyly.

“You’re here to root for me?”

“We’re here to see you win,” Inoichi says, from where he stands resting against tree beside Shikaku.

Sakura’s smile broadens and turns just a little feral.

“Just watch,” she says, shifting her mass of leaves to one hand, scooping a rock up, and pitching it into the air.

She doesn’t even look at it before she vanishes, the rock dropping in her place. High above him, she shouts “Take this!” and disappears into the mass of leaves she throws below her.

She does not reappear on the surface or above the leaves, which means she probably transformed into a leaf and is falling down upon him now.

Kakashi watches this with a quirked eyebrow. He’s honestly not sure how she could catch him. He probably should have let one of her earlier attempts succeed: but now he’s already demonstrated he can react fast enough to dodge her after she’s broken her transformation.

As he considers this, he continues to dash randomly through the clearing. As the leaves settle around him, Sakura predictably swaps herself with the ones closest to him and tries and fails to grab his forehead protector, her cries of frustration now additionally punctuated by their audience.

“You almost had him!”

“Just a little closer!”

“You’ve been robbed!”

After her second failure, clones flood the clearing, one for each of the watching jounin, and Kakashi tenses. They’re fake, but try telling Kakashi’s reflexes that the highly trained jounin his eyes are telling him are there are less of a threat than the eight-year-old trying to steal his forehead protector.

He bursts them as he passes them, and in his distraction, Sakura gets a finger on the plate of his forehead protector before he bats her hand away.

More oohs and awws from the audience, more outraged than before.

The clones he bursts are replaced by more clones, and although he knows she has nothing more than a puddle of chakra, her ability to suck chakra out of broken clones is definitely making it seem like she’s got an awful lot more than that.

A leaf gets stuck to his forehead protector, and he bats it away, only to find it stuck there. He reaches up to pry it off, and—his forehead protector vanishes from his head, to be replaced by nothing he can feel or sense. The clones all around him charge, and that makes him hesitate for just long enough that when he spins in place, catching sight of the rock that had been hiding directly over his left ear, he is just barely too slow to close his hand around it to block her replacement jutsu before it vanishes in a puff of smoke.

His mind spins, calculating trajectories, game forgotten in the adrenaline of the battle, but Inoichi’s clone makes the seal of his body switch technique, and that sends him hurtling away from it at full speed on reflex—directly away from Sakura’s most likely location.

By the time he has touched the ground again, the clones are gone, and beyond them Sakura proudly holds his forehead protector above her head, a broad grin on her face as the clearing dissolves in whoops of celebration.

She bounces excitedly, unties it and then ties it around her own head, the tails comically long behind her, hanging longer than her ridiculous pink hair.

“I’m a ninja!” she says. “I’m a ninja I’m a ninja I’m a ninja!”

Guy scoops her up in a twirl and she squeals. She is mobbed by other jounin to the point that Kakashi can’t see her through the crowd.

Asuma comes up beside Kakashi as Kakashi looks at the leaf still falling before his eyes with Obito's Sharingan. It is totally bereft of chakra, unlike every other leaf slowly falling from the sky, which all but shine under Obito's Sharingan.

“She infused all the leaves with chakra, used that chakra to stick it to your forehead protector, and while you were distracted by everything, infused your forehead protector with her chakra so she could swap with it?” Asuma says. “Rookie mistake.”

Kakashi turns to Asuma’s deadly serious face, and raises an eyebrow as Asuma’s serious expression slowly breaks, and he breaks out laughing.

“You lost to a eight year old!” He doubles over, cackling. “Not even a genin. Lost your forehead protector to an academy student.” He slaps his knee, and Kakashi tries and fails to resist the urge to kick him in the face.

Asuma dodges with a ridiculous little hop, and then straightens, still laughing.

Sakura makes her way out of the throng of her now-adoring fans, and grins up at him.

“I did it! I’m a genin! Say it!”

Kakashi smiles and opens his mouth to say just that, only for Asuma to interrupt him.

“Oh, you don’t want him. He’s just a lowly jounin. I’m the son of the Third, you know. That clearly means I’ll be the fifth Hokage.” He crouches down before her. “So let me welcome you to the ranks of the—”

“I know where you fucking sleep, Asuma,” Kakashi says, his voice dead serious.

Asuma raises his hands, doing his best to look very threatened and really just so confused as to why Kakashi would be angry.

Kakshi crouches down in front of Sakura, and holds out his hand.

“Congratulations, Sakura. Welcome to ranks of the ninja of Konoha.”

Sakura grins at him like the sun, and takes his hand to shake it as vigorously as she is able.

Kakashi lets her, and drinks in the sight of her blinding happiness with Obito’s Sharingan eye, ensuring he can never forget it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)
> 
> I am also part of a [writing discord](https://discord.gg/xZrqJC6)! Come scream with me about Naruto and also other things! (Also, you know, theoretically, write.  
> )  
> (We do that sometimes. I also do it... sometimess.)


	3. Chapter 3

On the night after Sakura’s promotion to genin, and about two hours after finally getting the damn Hokage to give him another forehead protector, Kakashi is stepping out of a nice long shower, hand up to his mouth in a yawn.

The last twenty-four hours have been filled with snickering from the shadows, and Sakura rubbing it in his face that she is a ninja and he is not, wearing a forehead protector that’s way too damn big for her, tails still hanging longer than her hair.

She has refused to let anyone change out the material for something more appropriate to the size of her tiny head.

It’s so rare he lets himself have a nice bath like this. His Hokage-ordered counselor likes to tell him he needs to let go more. This is Konoha, he’s safe here.

Tonight, Kakashi decided to take his advice. A nice, long soak, in a celebration of Sakura’s promotion, after the yakiniku party she somehow convinced Ino to convince her father to pay for. She invited all of the jounin who watched her final exam, plus him, Ino, and her parents.

It was delightfully domestic.

He remembers his own promotion to genin, not too long after his mother died, a dinner with his father, when his father smiled for the first time in what felt like forever.

_ I’m so proud of you, son _ , he’d said.

Kakashi smiles at the memory.

She might be making him soft, but then again, he’d quit Anbu so he could  _ be  _ soft, again. It might not be such a bad thing.

He stretches, examines his maskless face in the mirror with a smirk, and ties his towel around his midsection. He strolls to the window, spreads his hands along the sill, and takes in a deep breath of wood fire and trees and home and—

_ Blood _ .

Enough blood the air is fucking thick with it.

He surges out of the window in a moment, uncaring of his half-naked state. (He once was forced to kill a noble while totally naked, in front of the noble’s whole damn court. They didn’t mind, having been the ones who had ordered the hit.)

He bites his thumb, summoning his ninja dogs and sending them—

Then, through the air of the village, he hears Sakura’s voice. Ratcheted up two octaves and screaming like—

Like—

Kakashi is off across the tops of the roofs before his ninja dogs have finished summoning, towards the source of the voice. He slams his foot down on the house he’s currently standing on, caving in the roof (he’ll need to apologize later) and flinging himself high into the sky above Konoha—

Where is she where is she–

There.

Bright pink hair like a fucking beacon, crumpled onto the ground with her hair all around her head and ten feet away from her—

Itachi Uchiha.

He’s dashing towards her and Kakashi isn’t even falling yet, he can’t make it not again fucking Sage above not again please—

“ _ Itachi _ !” he bellows, channeling a not insubstantial portion of his chakra into his vocal cords, and ripping them despite it.

Itachi looks up, and across the distance of half the damn village his features are still crystal fucking clear to Obito’s Sharingan. In his eyes a sharingan Kakashi has never seen before spins as blood drips down his face like tears.

Kakashi snares Itachi in the strongest genjutsu Obito’s eye can conjure (the blood, that’s the Uchiha compound, so, best guess, he makes the genjutsu his family bloody and attacking him) and he knows his eye could never be enough against the genius of the Uchiha clan but as long as it delays him for even a moment—

He tags Sakura with his chakra, conjures a shadow clone to belt him towards the roofs below him so hard it pops itself, signs through the replacement technique in one hand while he charges the chidori with the other, and as soon as his feet touch the roof—Sakura is on a roof behind him, and he drives his hand into Itachi’s chest, the blade Itachi had been aiming for Sakura’s neck slashing harmlessly by Kakashi’s side.

Kakashi misses, Obito’s Sharingan not enough to give him the accuracy he needs against another sharingan, but he carves a hole in Itachi’s side all the same, fries his nervous system just a little bit, forces him back.

Itachi was Kakashi’s equal when they were in Anbu together, Kakashi was his commander by seniority but not strength and that was before he got his new sharingan, which means nothing good.

Kakashi pushes his advantage, pulling a kunai from a seal on his forearm and charging forward. He charges it with another chidori and lets it fly. Itachi doesn’t quite have enough time to dodge and chooses to block with his sword, which is a mistake, the resulting electric shock channeling into his body through his sword, knocking his legs out from under him.

Kakashi dashes forward—he can see dead Uchiha clan members lying on the ground inside the compound before him, spurring him forwards, into killing this man he once thought a comrade, a friend—and dives to the ground a moment before Itachi belches out a flawless sealless fireball.

Kakashi dashes back just before the wall between them meets the same fate, and fucking hell, Itachi is back on his feet, smiling serenely, hand green on his side.

Kakshi can’t let him finish that, but before he can move, Itachi’s new sharingan is suddenly all he can see, Obito’s sharingan is trying to fight against it, trying to pull him out of it, but—

There is a sound, not a kunai, moving all wrong, too slow, too ungainly, and Itachi staggers as a fucking rock hits him from the side, breaking his concentration and freeing Kakashi from whatever the fuck that was. Two roofs away is… Guy? Three fucking rocks in his hands, his brown irises ragged, chest heaving, teeth bared and—

Sakura.

She transformed into the strongest person she knew and started throwing fucking rocks fuck fuck fuck.

Stupid fucking child.

His hands blur through the seals for the clone, as he closes the distance between them, twenty Kakashis covering the rooftops, all indistinguishable from the real thing, because Kakashi has Obito’s sharingan, and knows what they’re supposed to look like, in the hope Itachi will pay attention to any of them, but—

Itachi’s gaze catches Sakura’s before Kakashi can get a clone between them, and her eyes roll up in her head, leaving nothing for Kakashi to do but catch her as she falls.

Kakashi screams out the same anguished cry he made when Rin fell into his arms, or when Obito fell, or Minato or—or—or—

Sakura opens Guy’s eyes, brown irises even more ragged than before.

That.

That can’t mean anything good.

“It hurts,” she says, because she’s a fucking seven-year-old, what the fuck did he think he was doing.

“I’m sorry, Sakura—” he picks her up and Sage, she’s so light, and dashes away from the roof a moment before Itachi crashes down upon it, his face still so fucking serene, like he’s doing his Sage-given duty.

Kakashi hasn’t wanted to kill anyone more in ten fucking years.

Itachi looks up at Kakashi, and Kakashi carefully keeps his gaze on the top seam of Itachi’s fucking butcher’s apron.

“What have you done, Itachi.”

“I tested the limits of my abilities, Senpai. I found the rest of my clan…” he drifts off, almost dreamily. “Lacking.”

Kakashi sets Sakura, still whining and squirming, down on the roof below him, and he can’t even glance at her, he knows Itachi would be able to kill him for it, and steps forward.

“I remembered you as so strong, Senpai, but is this really all you are? You can’t even look me in the eyes.”

Kakashi doesn’t rise to the bait. He spins his hands through the seals for the Hidden in the Mist technique, and mist spreads out from him. He whistles to his ninja dogs to find any jounin they can and wake them, something he should have done before he started this mess, if he’d been thinking straight.

Itachi laughs lightly under his breath.

A breath later and Kakashi is before him, and once again he only barely avoids taking Kakashi’s chidori to the chest. This time, though, he can’t dodge as cleanly, and Kakashi takes his left shoulder and arm with it.

It leaves Kakashi weak-kneed with chakra exhaustion, but he isn’t empty yet. He drives his open palm into Itachi’s chest, and Itachi dodges again, back this time. Kakashi follows him, catching his stomach, and crushes some part of Itachi’s digestive tract with his gentle fist strike.

Itachi’s chest heaves, but Kakashi’s been the copy ninja for longer than Itachi’s been fucking alive, and he matches Itachi’s fireball with his own, refusing to give an inch.

His student is behind him. If he falls back, she dies.

Itachi continues to fall back, and in the corner of Kakashi’s eyes, he is gratified to see his serene fucking smile is gone, replaced with a mask of pure fury and hate. “I will kill you, you insignificant—”

He is interrupted by the blaring of the Konoha alarm system, and his snarl of displeasure is audible.

Kakashi forms a rasengan in his free hand, counters Itachi’s sword strike with it,leaving nothing left of the sword but twisted metal. He pushes in, in, in. He ignores his dangerously low chakra reserves, countering another fireball, blowing away a summoned crow with another rasengan.

Just a little longer just a little longer just a little longer.

Finally, Itachi falls, and some stupid part of Kakashi relaxes.

Their eyes meet—”Tsukuyomi”—and the world is black and red and pain.

In which his sharingan and every technique he has ever learned is useless.

It is.

It is an eternity Kakashi has no desire to detail.

It passes.

Kakashi opens his eyes to see Itachi bearing down on him, a grin splitting his face, breaking the lines of blood running down it, and Kakashi does not even try to dodge it.

He’s not sure he could—his arms leaden with chakra exhaustion, Obito’s eye blind without chakra to power it.

But regardless of whether he could, he doesn’t even try, because he has spent forty eight hours unable to stop the horrors inflicted upon him.

A fist wrapped in a red haze crashes into Itachi’s face before he closes the distance, and Kakashi stares in wonder at Might Guy before him, his face twisted in fury and determination.

No smile.

No nice guy pose.

But their eyes meet for the barest hints of an instant, and he can feel the warmth in that gaze.

“Seventh Gate,” Guy intones, and he erupts in blue light.

Itachi’s face hardens, and the sharingan in his right eye spins.

Fuck—“Guy—”

It’s too late, but—

“No,” Guy says, and Itachi just barely dodges out of the way of his fist.

Itachi is fast, but Guy is faster. Glancing blows become full blows, and Itachi’s steps become staggered.

Itachi staggers back into a wall of his compound and there is fear in his eyes.

Guy doesn’t even hesitate, closing the distance, and driving his fist—

Straight through the air where Itachi was a moment before.

Kakashi fails to place where Itachi went, but Guy does not, and is immediately upon a now-empty telephone pole.

Now, further away, on the wall around the village, Kakashi can see a figure wrapped in black, a bloody figure over its shoulder.

Guy crashes into the wall with all the force of a Kage, but the figure is already gone.

“Sorry,” a disembodied voice says. “But I have plans for this one.”

Guy spends a moment in the massive hole he just punched in the wall of Konoha, eyes darting back and forth before his shoulders slump and he re-appears beside Kakashi.

“Guy—”

“Eternal Rival,” Guy says, taking Kakashi in his arms, grin pained but intact. The world blinks, and Kakashi is being set down on a roof, as Guy closes his gates and crumples onto the ground beside him. “You did it,” Guy continues, voice pained. “One day, I will best you, eternal rival.”

Kakashi blinks, and then looks down at the figure before him, wrapped in bright green, but quivering and whimpering in a way Guy never has.

Sakura.

Through his leaden limbs, Kakashi crawls over to Sakura, and turns her to face him.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re safe now.”

Her currently-brown eyes are concerningly blank (and concerningly ragged) before they snap to him, and she surges into him, buries her face in his chest, and her body is wracked with deafening sobs.

Kakashi closes his eyes against the pain, and pats her back the best he can.

He meets Guy’s gaze over Sakura’s back.

“You saved her,” Guy says. “You saved all of them.”

Kakashi frowns for a moment before he registers the screaming he had been tuning out. The screaming that echoed from the Uchiha compound.

A tired, pained smile plays at Kakashi unfortunately un-masked lips.

As his eyes close against his will, he remembers what Minato had told him, so long ago.

_ Don’t pray for silence, Kakashi. _

_ Screams mean there’s still someone to save. _

Kakashi wakes to Inoichi’s frowning face.

“We have some questions,” he says.

Of course they do.

“I’m in the hospital,” Kakashi counters.

“Someone tried to kill the Uchiha clan, and they already wanted to start a civil war. Be happy I didn’t force the medics to wake you up earlier.”

So. 

He did force the medics to wake him up, then.

Kakshi takes a deep breath, and nods. “Where’s Sakura?”

“She’s already been discharged. She’s—” Inoichi pauses and a pause like that has never meant a good thing in Kakashi’s entire fucking life.

Despite his chakra exhaustion, Kakashi surges up to a sitting position and is about to push himself to his feet before Inoichi’s hand catches him by the chest, and pushes him to the bed.

He is too weak to resist, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it.

“Itachi’s technique tortured me for—” Anbu training, drilled into him so deep he could count even in torture “—forty-eight hours. He used it on her. How is she.”

Inoichi’s mouth falls slack. “Oh Sage,” he says.

Kakashi gets right back up, only to be once again hindered by his staggering lack of chakra, and also Inoichi’s hand.

“She broke the jutsu,” he says, when Kakashi doesn’t stop trying to get up.

Kakashi blinks, and sags back into the bed.

“She… she did?”

Inoichi nods, and Kakashi sags a little further.

“I interviewed her myself, and she couldn’t recall any of the visions Itachi’s jutsu conjured, only that breaking it hurt.” Stupid fucking brilliant child.

“I couldn’t break that with the Sharingan,” Kakashi says.

They’re both silent for a bit.

“Who the fuck did you choose as your apprentice, Kakashi?”

Kakashi shrugged. “I was just impressed with her ability to use the henge with the wrong seals,” he says.

He twitches his lips, feeling something—missing.

Inoichi hands him a mask and his forehead protector, and Kakashi accepts them both gratefully. He hands Inoichi back the eye patch he had had over his sharingan, and Inoichi frowns down at it, before tossing it carelessly onto the side table.

“As for her prognosis,” Inoichi says, “it seems that breaking that technique did some damage to her chakra coils, but the doctors are recommending bedrest, so she’s been sent home.”

Kakashi sighs with relief. He’s a bit concerned about the damage her chakra coils might have sustained. She really didn’t have a lot of leeway to work with, but she was alive.

She was okay.

“Now,” Inoichi says. “I have some questions.”

“I’m an open book, as always,” Kakashi responds, as brightly as he can.

Inoichi rolls his eyes.

“I’m the head of T&I,” he grumbles, “but noo, Inoichi-kun,” he continues in an imitation of the Third’s voice, “it’s too important, you have to do the interviews yourself.” Kakashi chuckles, and Inoichi scowls at him. “When did you realize something was wrong?”

Kakashi reaches back in his memory. He had had Obito’s sharingan open at the time, and had seen the moon, so… he does the math in his head. “2:24,” he says.

“Hmm,” Inoichi says contemplatively, with his confirmed-his-suspicions expression. “How did you notice?”

“I smelled blood on the wind.” 

Inoichi nods, his expression unchanging. “Okay, tell me what happened, in order.”

Kakashi does so, to the best of his ability. To summoning his ninja dogs to—

“I’m sorry, she hit him with a rock? Itachi Uchiha, a man who had to be fought down with two of the top jounin in the village, and still put them both in the hospital. She hit him with a rock?”

“He was distracted?” Or, more specifically: rocks fly unpredictably, too slow with all the wrong sounds, so all of his ninja instincts had worked against him. Also, like, he  _ was _ distracted.

Inoichi gives his head a shake like,  _ Why the fuck is this my job? _

(Answer: he is really good at it.)

(Moral of the story: never be good at a bad job.)

“Why don’t we just arm everyone with rocks?” he mutters. “Someone comes in for a protection job, we just give them some good old Konoha rocks.”

There’s a moment of silence.

“Are you okay, Inoichi?”

“We have twenty-two Konoha citizens brutally murdered by a trusted jounin, a new missing nin, a mysterious figure who rescued that missing nin, and a civil war brewing. It’s been a long couple days.”

Kakashi gives Inoichi his best sympathetic face.

Unfortunately, Inoichi sees straight through it to the underlying— _ Thank the Sage it’s you and not me _ face, and scowls.

“Continue.”

Kakashi gets to the man in black before Inoichi interrupts him again.

“Is that all you can tell us about him?”

“Itachi’s eye jutsu had already drained the rest of my chakra. I was totally blind in Obito’s eye at that point. I barely caught a glance at him before he fled.”

Inoichi sighs, and nods for Kakashi to continue.

There isn’t much left, and Kakashi finishes it up in only a couple of sentences.

Inoichi nods.

He pockets his pen, and glances down at his notes. As he does so, they rustle just wrong, and Kakashi realizes belatedly that they’re in a sound suppression field.

Obviously.

Wow, Kakashi is incredibly out of it.

Inoichi finishes tidying up his notes, and tucks them back under his arm.

“Here’s the current situation: Fugaku Uchiha and Mikoto Uchiha are dead. Sasuke, miraculously, is not. We’re not sure why, but the interim clan head is not surprised but tight lipped about it. It looks like Itachi started with his own house and then worked outwards, neighbor to neighbor. We lost nineteen Uchiha and the three Anbu that were supposed to patrol the night of the attack.”

Kakashi nods.

“The killings stop at 2:23, if we can trust the coroner.” They both chuckle. Rule number one of intra-village politics: never doubt the coroner. “Which is also when you and the Inuzukas started smelling blood. Our best guess is that Sakura Haruno interrupted him at that point, and then screamed bloody murder, but that would mean that a like five-hour-old genin broke a genjutsu that was holding across the entire village.” Inoichi’s face shows what he thinks of that idea. “Then you and Guy drove him out of the village. Since then, Sousuke Uchiha has become interim head.”

Well, shit.

Kakashi knows Sousuke.

If the village has Danzou—

Then the Uchiha have Sousuke.

“Yeah,” Inoichi agrees. “He is claiming the village brainwashed Itachi into attacking his own people, trying to wipe them out.”

That’s a concerningly specific accusation.

Kakashi meets Inoichi’s gaze. There are some things that can’t be said, even under a sound suppression field.

Inoichi shakes his head.

That’s comforting. Kakashi’s done a lot of horrible things as Anbu, but—

There are lines that just shouldn’t be crossed.

“He is claiming that the Senju are trying to wipe them out,” Inoichi continues, as if that exchange had never happened. 

“Of course,” Kakashi says. “The  _ one _ Senju. Lady Tsunade has always hated the Uchiha.”

“Hah,” Inoichi says without humor. “Don’t say that outside this room.”

“Understood.”

“We’ve had some evidence Sousuke has been trying to gather support for a rebellion, and it looks like he has decided to treat this as fuel to the fire.”

Great.

“Anything else I should know?”

“Congratulations. You and Guy are heroes of the Uchiha clan. Half of the survivors saw you two fight Itachi to protect their compound, and not even Sousuke has been able to sway them. We’re going to need that.”

“Who do you want us to support?”

“Shouko.”

Kakashi frowns. Shouko?

Kakashi isn’t sure he knows a Shouko.

“Yes, that’s kind of the point. She’s been campaigning futilely inside the Uchiha clan for the last decade to invite non-Uchiha into the military police, and integrate more Uchiha academy graduates into standard ninja forces.”

Well, shit. Kakashi thought he’d never see the day.

“She even wants to tear down the wall.”

Well, double shit.

“When do you need me to go parading about?”

“Yesterday. Guy has already been discharged, and is helping with the cleaning effort.”

Kakashi blinks.

“I’m suffering from chakra exhaustion. I can’t walk.”

“That’s what crutches are for.”

Inoichi sets a pair of crutches by Kakashi’s bed.

Kakashi looks at them, and then up at Inoichi.

“Hokage’s orders.”

Kakashi sighs, and heaves himself off the bed.

“Oh, and those daffodils—Sakura brought them.”

Kakashi stops, and glances at the vase of messily picked daffodils on his side table.

He smiles.

“Say, Inoichi,” Kakashi says as he pulls on his jounin uniform. “When I met Ino a couple months ago she said I was ‘the worst’.” He heaves himself up onto the crutches, and pulls up next to Inoichi. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? You know, I don’t think I ever said two words to her before that.”

Inoichi glares.

“I knew you were the worst before you said a word to me, so it probably just runs in the family.”

With that, Inoichi body-flickers away.

Now, Kakashi doesn’t feel like that’s entirely fair. The first time they met, it was after Kakashi had made Inoichi wait two hours for a debrief.

He was only like, an hour late at most to the yakiniku party he’d first met Ino at.

That can’t be it.

With a chuckle and one last glance at the mostly-petalless daffodils Sakura picked for him, Kakashi hobbles out the door.

The sun is setting by the time Kakashi makes his way to the Haruno household.

In the garden, Sakura and Ino are hunched together. 

He should have come here first, before going to the Uchiha compound. He should have visited the doctors, to find out the extent of the damage to her coils, and what exactly they were planning to do about it.

He shouldn’t have started training a fucking seven-year-old.

Sage, what had he been thinking.

In his mind’s eye, he imagines her rejecting him, blaming him for her almost death, and she’d be right. In his mind’s eye, he imagines her parents throwing him out, trying to attack him with their pitiful civilian strength, and he doesn’t stop them.

_ How could you do this to our daughter _ , they would yell.  _ It’s all— _

In his mind’s eye he imagines what would have happened if he had been even a moment later, Sakura’s blood staining the stone, her life dripping away—

“Kakashi-san.”

Kakashi blinks back to the real world, and finds Ino looking up at him, her pupil-less eyes so like and unlike her father’s. It feels like there’s some understanding there, like she’d seen into his mind, seen what he’d been thinking.

It’s unsettling, coming from a seven-year-old. What hell do the Yamanaka feed their children.

A moment later, Sakura looks up, and—Sage’s horns on a stick.

Her gaze is so blank, so empty. Her irises are just as ragged as they had been when they’d been hidden in Guy’s face.

What did that mean?

“Sakura,” he says.

She blinks, slowly.

Inoichi was wrong, this was—

Why didn’t he come here first.

If only he could fucking body-flicker, but he can’t, so he hobbles as fast as he can, up to the garden fence and over it.

“Sakura,” he repeats, when he’s before her, and she stares up at him, blinking slowly, before shaking her head.

She smiles, and then realizes it’s him, and scowls.

“Kakashi,” she grouses.

Ino at her side looks aghast, but Kakashi feels relief, deep in his bones.

She isn’t gone.

She’s still her.

She’s still human.

“ _ Sakura! _ ” Ino hisses. “He saved your life.”

Someone really needs to teach Ino how to whisper. She’s really bad at it.

Sakura looks at Ino with those ragged irises, and there is a moment in which she’s not there anymore, eyes staring blankly over Ino’s shoulder.

Long enough for Ino and Kakashi to trade glances. He sees that Ino has her hand tightly curled around Sakura’s, and she tugs at it now, pulling Sakura out of whatever trance she’d been in.

She blinks, looks at Ino, looks at Kakashi.

“Could be a genjutsu,” she says. “Could be a transformation.”

Ino sighs, sounding very put-upon and not at all like a moment before she had been staring at Kakashi with terror in her eyes and her heart in her throat. She’s either seven years old or a great liar.

Kakashi would put even money on either.

“He was really strong,” Sakura continues, moving her gaze back to him, and narrowing her eyes. “He could do—”

Her eyes unfocus, and Kakashi winces.

Ino tugs at her arm, and Sakura returns to them.

“He could do all sorts of cool jutsu,” Sakura continues. “Kakashi can’t do any cool jutsu, I’ve only ever seen him do the hidden in the leaves technique, and I can do that.”

Kakashi laughs, just a little, and it hurts as it comes out.

He sits down, as Ino makes noises at Sakura about how dense she’s being. Kakashi sets his crutches against the garden wall and sees motion in the curtains by the window before him and sees Sakura’s father standing there, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably, looking at his daughter, and her…

Her once again blank stare.

When Sakura’s father’s gaze turns to him it is not full of vitriol and hate, but it is beseeching. Help our daughter, it says.

Please.

Kakashi sets his back against the garden fence because as much as it pains him to admit it, even to himself, he can only barely sit up.

“Sakura,” he says, and her gaze focuses and rests on him. Kakashi flicks a glance at Ino, up at Sakura’s farher, and then over at the Anbu resting on a neighboring roof.

He signs for the need to privacy, and the Anbu appears briefly, slaps down some seals, and then vanishes again.

“See, that’s a  _ real _ ninja,” Sakura says.

Another glance at Ino, and—

Trying to teach a seven-year-old the importance of informational security, especially as it concerns to their best friend, is a futile effort (it worked on him because he didn’t have any friends—convenient, that).

Sakura is staring blankly again, and Kakashi waits until Sakura comes back to herself.

“What you did that night,” Kakashi says, and Sakura flinches at the memory, which is—well, it’s better than the blankness. “It saved a lot of lives.”

Sakura smiles, but shudders a little.

“There was so much blood,” she says.

She’d been not too far from the house of the clan head. Where the massacre had started. He’d seen it too.

“I know, but the rest of the Uchiha clan is alive, because of—” Sakura’s eyes go distant, and Kakashi waits until she’s looking at him again. “Because of you.” She smiles faintly. “An S-class mission,” Kakashi continues. Waits until the haze in Sakura’s eyes clears. “That might be a record, you know—a successful S-class mission on your second day of being a genin.”

Sakura giggles, fingering her forehead protector, like she still can’t believe it’s there. She gets lost for a moment there, which Ino brings her out of by tugging at one of the tails of her forehead protector.

Sakura snaps back to the present and holds her forehead protector protectively against her. “Hey, no, Ino, this is mine! Get your own!” she says. “There’s one right there!”

She’s pointing at him.

“Hey,” he says, but it is too late. Ino surges forward and Kakashi is literally so weakened he loses a fight with an academy student. She holds his forehead protector proudly above her head for a moment before realizing what she’s done and blanching.

Then belatedly, Sakura cheers. “You did it, Ino! You’re a ninja now!”

“No,” Kakashi corrects. “That was only for you.”

Sakura ignores him. “You have to put it on. Put it on.”

Slowly, Ino does so, glancing worriedly at Kakashi as she does. It doesn’t look any less ridiculous on her than it did on Sakura. Out of the corner of his eye, Kakashi can see the Anbu shaking.

Cat mask—Tenzou. Fucker’s supposed to be protecting him, he’s pretty sure.

There’s a moment of silence, in which Sakura is staring at Ino’s collarbone and Ino’s face crumples a little.

She’s not quite in reach, so Kakashi has to heave himself off the fence to give her shoulder a comforting squeeze.

She looks at him sidelong, and then smiles a fake smile when Sakura returns to the world, and cheers again.

“You look great, Ino!” Sakura says, and Ino laughs a little brokenly.

Sakura frowns, but Kakashi interrupts her.

“Sakura, can you tell me what happened?”

Sakura looks at him, and her gaze shutters, shoulders slumping.

“I already told Ino’s-dad—” she says it like one word: Inosdad “—do I have to say it again?”

Kakashi’s lips twist.

“Maybe I can help?” he says, because he doesn’t trust Inichi to give it to him straight—the fucker implied pretty hard Sakura was totally fine and look at this shit.

“I’m fine!” Sakura says. “I’m—” When Sakura comes back to the world, she looks like she’s about to cry, and Ino throws her arms around her. “I’m not fine, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The doctor’s told me to go home, because they didn’t know—” Another pause. “—they didn’t know what was wrong with me.”

“I’m pretty smart, you know,” he says, mentally going through all the recent sightings of Lady Tsunade. Last seen in the land of Hot Water, three months ago. Could still be there, could be—

“Pfft,” Sakura laughs, just a little too late. “No you’re not. You’re  _ Kakashi _ .”

Kakashi laughs a little despite himself. He signals Cat to get him Sakura’s medical records. If the doctors really just released a child with these symptoms because they were stumped, he’s going to have some very painful words with them.

He sees Cat raise his hand to his ear and shift like he always did when he was whispering.

“I—” Sakura says, and then hesitates. “I got woken up by something which felt—really weird.” She looks at him under her ridiculous pink eyelashes, and he nods. “I could feel a twist in my chakra, like you always told me to look for—” She stares at him blankly, and Ino rocks her until she comes back to them. “But it was hard, like—like I don’t know. I followed it, and then I was at the Uchiha compound, but I didn’t recognize it, I just thought it was a wall and and—” Blankness. “And then I climbed it and I couldn’t see anything but I could kind of feel it and there was something just horrible, my stomach felt so sick, and the knot hurt and I just—I just pushed and pushed at that knot and it hurt so much but I knew something was wrong, so I pushed until it broke and—” Sakura stops, but this time only looks down at her hands. “And I felt like someone had burned me, on the inside.” 

Chakra scarring. This is why people use kais—you free yourself without breaking the jutsu, reducing the risk that the backlash of the broken jutsu will fry your insides. Why did he teach her Genjutsu Cancellation, why didn’t he teach her about the dangers of the technique—

The answer, of course, is because it had been so much more impressive to see her easily unweave his genjutsu like they were nothing. He is the worst teacher on the fucking— 

“Then I saw him, and I tried to run, but when I looked back at him, the whole world went wrong, and the horrible wrongness was knotted up in my everywhere, in my eyes and my skin and my blood and—” Sakura is crying now, and Ino is also crying and Kakashi had been under the impression she’d heard this before, but a look at her face tells him that in fact, she had not. He is making a lot of bad decisions today. “I knew it was something bad, I could feel the chakra, that it wanted to make me hurt, so I broke it. Every little knot, I broke it, and each time I did it hurt like I was also getting burned on the inside, but I broke them all, and he couldn’t hurt me, and then.” She looks up at him, and her eyes become dazed. She broke Itachi’s jutsu. (Tsukuyomi, did he call it?) One he couldn’t break with a kai and the sharingan. Maybe… maybe training her to detect and break genjutsu the old-fashioned way wasn’t so horrible after all. “I’m sorry, I know that was the wrong way to do it, and now I can’t be a ninja anymore because my chakra is all broken but—”

“No, Sakura,” Kakashi interrupts. “You did it right.” Sakura blinks, and looks up at him. “He caught me in that jutsu,” Kakashi says, and Sakura’s eyes widen.

“But I thought—I thought I stopped that.”

“You did, once. But he caught me with it again, and it was—” Kakashi takes a deep breath. “I’m very glad you were able to break it.” Sakura sniffles, and nods. 

Sakura blinks, eyes wet, and then continues.

“Then,” she says after a moment of blankness. “Then you were there, but you were all stiff, so I turned into the big green jounin because he looked strong but it was hard, there was something wrong with my chakra? I had to use my hands, but I did it, and I hit him with a rock and then—” she looks away. “And then he used that jutsu again, and I broke it, just like the first time. But it was. It was worse, I couldn’t stand anymore, and it hurt so much worse. I couldn’t even stop being that big jounin. I couldn’t move my hands, I couldn’t do the seal-less break. I could just lay there and feel my chakra leaking away.”

Ino rocks her, and Sakura leans into her. She stares blankly into the direction that includes Cat for a long moment.

“That’s it,” she says.

“Thank you for telling me,” Kakashi says, and she nods.

Cat flashes to Kakashi’s side, and Kakashi takes the report from him.

“Is that mine?”

Kakashi nods. “It’ll tell me how to help you. I’m still your teacher, you know.”

Sakura gives a wet scoff, which Kakashi appreciates. She then pushes Ino away a little.

“You’re gross,” Sakura says after a hair too long.

Ino stares at her open-mouthed.

In fairness. She is gross. They both are.

“You’re grosser!”

Ino tackles her, and Sakura giggles, as they roll through the dirt.

Huh. Here Kakashi was thinking little girls were less gross than boys. His mistake.

He scans through the report, and then holds it up for Cat to take it back. He can feel Cat’s irritation at being reduced to a delivery-boy, but Kakashi helps him get over it by giving him his Anbu commander glare.

Cat appears, takes the report, and rests a comforting hand on Kakashi’s shoulder for a split-second before vanishing.

Kakashi mulls over the contents of the report as he watches Sakura and Ino tackle each other through the garden, getting very, very gross. Dirt and snot and tears and.

Kakashi would like to establish that he was not this gross as a child.

The doctors were not as incompetent as Sakura and Inoichi made them seem. The diagnosis is extensive chakra scarring, particularly around all of her tenketsu. It says something about how the Tsukuyomi worked, and also explains her symptoms. Scarring inhibited chakra control, so she’d been forced to use seals for her transformation after the first Tsukuyomi, and then further scarring caused by the second Tsukuyomi removed almost all of her chakra control, leaving her unable to break her technique. She was unable to move because of simple chakra exhaustion, which was not helped by the slow drain of the transformation technique on her reserves. Chakra scarring is known to cause absence seizures, when the body is unable to pass enough chakra through certain chakra pathways in the brain, causing a momentary lapse of awareness until chakra could pass again. Scary, but generally benign.

The prognosis is bleak for her future as a ninja, but doesn’t appear life-threatening. Chakra scarring is traditionally viewed as untreatable. In children, chakra scarring can self-heal to a certain extent, so bedrest really was a reasonable prescription. She also has an appointment with Toumi Hyuuga, head Hyuuga healer, which is. Damn. He’s had comrades who had died because Toumi refused to treat non-Hyuuga. Apparently saving a noble clan is enough to get you in her door. She could determine the true extent of the scarring, and might be able to use her gentle palm to relieve some of it. But the healing is unlikely to be complete, because he knows of several Hyuuga jounin who never fully recovered from chakra scarring.

The pile of dirt and bodily fluids that are Sakura and Ino crash into and over his legs. Ino has the decency to look sheepish. Sakura just looks proud, because she’s on top.

“Sensei,” she says, and Kakashi swallows his surprise, “I won.”

Ino makes an affronted noise, but Sakura, despite her horrible taijutsu skill, is still a genin, to Ino’s academy student, and now that she’s decided this is a game she wants to win, it’s a game she would win.

“Congratulations.” He waits for her absence seizure to pass. “It’s very hard for a genin to defeat an academy student. It’s something to be proud of.”

Sakura gapes at him in outrage, and he chuckles, knocking the both of them off of his knees and taking the opportunity to steal his forehead protector back from Ino.

“Ino’s super strong!” Sakura asserts, shoving a finger in his face. Behind her, Ino colors faintly. “You take that back.”

“Sakura—“

“No! Kakashi isn’t even a real ninja!” Damn. Back to Kakashi. “He doesn’t get to talk about you like that.”

Behind her Ino smiles an embarrassed but genuine smile.

Kakashi raises his hands before him in surrender.

Sakura snorts, and turns away. She sits there, frozen for a moment, reminding them all that in fact, not everything here is fun and games. “Don’t listen to him, Ino,” she says after it passes.

Ino’s face when she sees—actually, fully recognizes—how dirty Sakura is is priceless. He counts out one second before understanding dawns in Ino’s eyes that she is, in fact, just as bad.

“Girls,” Haruno-san calls from the doorway. “I think you two could use a bath, don’t you?”

Ino nods, and, after a long, uncomfortable moment, Sakura nods as well.

“Okay Dad,” she says, popping up to her feet.

“Sakura,” Kakashi says, from where he is slowly pushing himself to his feet. Sakura stops, and then looks up at him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “Do you still want to be a ninja?”

Sakura’s face breaks in surprise. Then her eyes harden in determination. “Yes.” After a moment of blankness, she continues. “I want to be strong enough I can stop people like that horrible Uchiha from ever hurting anyone ever again. I’ll be strong enough I can protect you, and Guy, and strong enough no one ever needs to get hurt.”

Kakashi feels a complicated mixture of surprise and pride.

He smiles.

“In that case, I promise I’ll find a way to fix your chakra. You’ll be a ninja again, I promise.”

Sakura hesitates, and then she smiles, bright and wide and without a shred of doubt.

Her belief in him knocks the air out of him like a chakra punch straight to the gut.

She then turns and trots after Ino towards her father, who is looking at Kakashi, his gaze conflicted.

“Say goodbye to your teacher, Sakura,” he says, as Sakura passes him.

Sakura stops at his feet, and then looks back at Kakashi over her shoulder with a glare.

“ _ Bye _ ,” she says, with all the contempt she can manage.

“Sakura!” her dad scolds, but Sakura has already dashed past him into the house.

Kakashi bows his head to Haruno-san, and then hobbles his way over to the Haruno family fence, ignoring the perfectly functioning gate, because ninja don’t take gates, regardless of whether they can stand unaided.

Chakra scarring is  _ traditionally _ viewed as untreatable, but thankfully, there have been plenty of ninja that have scoffed at that tradition. First among them—the Toad sannin, Jiraiya, who managed to find a way to fully recover after Orochimaru torched his entire chakra system with some Sage-forsaken jutsu. If memory serves, he wrote out the procedure he used, and although no one has ever replicated his success, there’s a first time for everything. If not him, then, well. Konoha also has the most powerful healer of their age, if only anyone can find her.

There is a bit of a spring in his hobble as Kakashi hobbles home, Cat dogging his steps.

And also.

If Sakura wants to be powerful enough to stop an Itachi alone, then, well, he has some work to do. 

In his mind’s eye, he sees Itachi closing on his student—

Kakashi being too slow, twice over.

He shakes his head clear of the images.

If it’s how to be faster, well.

Kakashi has a couple of ideas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you might have noticed, Itachi is evil in this one.
> 
> I’ve always hated the “the village ordered the massacre” plotpoint, so I have removed it. Itachi tried to kill his clan because he’s evil. Maybe he had some encouragement from nefarious places, but, in the end, it was his choice, and he did it because he wanted them to die. (This is the first of many, many plot points I have stolen/will steal from Branch’s [It’s Just That Any One of Us Is Half Without Another One Is You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/230916).)

**Author's Note:**

> Let’s goooooooooo


End file.
